Written on the WindDouglas Sirk is considered the finest director ever to work in melodrama. His films of the 1950s, though written off at the time as mere “women’s pictures” have been since re-appraised as some of the best work of the period. Indeed, Sirk’s work with such under-utilized stars as Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman drew out hitherto unknown qualities from these supposedly wooden performers. Foremost amongst Sirk’s films of the period is Written on the Wind, a tale of social collapse, unbridled sexual tension and immoral collapse within a rich Texas oil family. Indeed, Written on the Wind is the seedy underside of the James Dean / George Stevens classic Giant. An alcoholic son (Robert Stack) marries his father’s secretary (Lauren Bacall) who must fend off the advances of family friend Rock Hudson and deal with Stack’s lascivious daughter (Dorothy Malone, who won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award). Lush Technicolor cinematography frames this story of the self-destructive idle rich, people beyond the laws of regular social behaviour and indulging their every whim unbound by moral restraint or civil behaviour. It’s the American Dream: wealth and family. But beneath the veneer of success is an uncontrollably lustful, decadent human nature. It has been said that the business of America is business – indeed, business here provides the illusion of stability to Sirk’s characters, the imperative of purpose in the acquisition of yet more wealth and the myth of marriage and children, obsessing Bacall but hampering playboys Stack and Hudson, with Malone trapped in the middle, mad with unfulfilled desire. Money, power and the decadence it brings are director Sirk’s concerns in this study of familial dysfunction. He takes an emblematic ideal of Americana and gradually undercuts with a grimly fatalistic view of human nature as anarchic, restrained by the very codes of civilized conduct it aspires to. But this was the 1950s and Sirk is careful with his morality play, stressing tensions below the behavioural surface of things. Even with wealth and power, humans want more, an interpersonal fulfilment that society offers in the form of marriage and family but which is merely another form of social entrapment. Sexual temptation, desirous need, though only alluded to in the dialogue is what underlies the social rituals of family and marital fidelity, illusions that the characters feel they must live up to but simply cannot sustain, the system of the ideal – wife, home and kids – crashing down. Sirk examines marriage as the acceptable ideal of human heterosexual interpersonal communication, the social ideal to which we are supposed to aspire. Hence, Bacall resists Stack’s offer of a night of “fun” and holds out for a proposal. When she finds a gun under her husband’s pillow, she has the first cause to doubt the stability of their relationship. In the 1950s, sex outside of marriage was still considered immoral: marriage was the convention that was held to bind decent society together. But there were tensions below the surface, the quiet discontent of women bored with and dreading convention, women like Dorothy Malone, a girl, unlike Bacall, who is looking for a little “fun” only to be retrained by her hypocritical brother Stack, a playboy who wants to protect his sister’s virtue but will go after those whose virtue he would abuse. Virtue; honour: these are the codes supposedly distinguishing the American ideal, codes which Sirk reveals collapsing in sheer lascivious discontent: sexual need here motivates human nature, exemplified in the Academy Award winning performance of Malone, a woman who wants Hudson, “marriage or no marriage.” Sirk’s films have been considered appraisals of social collapse, of troubled families and American ideals, but in Written on the Wind he frames this collapse in terms of the clash between the façade of civilization (as symbolized by marriage) and the anarchy of socially repressed sexual desire, the timeless dichotomy between love and lust, between social convention and human nature. Slowly, the veneer of family and especially marriage is eroded in Written on the Wind. And just as Malone is trapped by the rules of conduct expected of decent women, so too Stack is trapped by the ideal of Patriarchal responsibility: he longs to be a father, to have a son to carry on the proud family tradition and fulfil the ideal of wife, child and home. But he cannot have children, and his failure to live up to the role of Patriarch that convention decrees he inherit slowly leads him to despair and ruin. Both Stack and Malone are driven by their failure to live up to convention – Malone by her wanton disregard of it and Stack by his secret admiration of it, confounded by what he sees as a personal failing. Director Sirk had a masterly control of melodramatic material and his assessment of the nature of convention and need underlying human behaviour finds a powerful expression in Written on the Wind. Written on the Wind is one of the most memorable of 1950s films and a superior example of the melodramatic form, here in a fine widescreen transfer by Umbrella Entertainment which preserves the delicate compositions and often stunning use of colour that were always the hallmarks of Sirk’s cinema.
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