Written on the Wind - Criterion Collection
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Features
• Anamorphic
• Closed-captioned
• Color
• DVD-Video
• Subtitled
• Widescreen
• NTSC
In Theaters : December, 1956
DVD Release : 19 June, 2001 |
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Written on the Wind - Criterion Collection description
Douglas Sirk puts the opera back into soap opera in this exquisitely baroque melodrama, the epitome of Technicolor gloss. Rock Hudson (as wonderfully wooden as ever) and Lauren Bacall play stalwart examples of altruism, clean living, and good old American ambition, but Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone steal the film as white trash millionaire siblings stewing in self-pity. The plot reads like an episode of Dallas: Texas oil-baron playboy Stack steals good girl Bacall from best friend Hudson while Stack's sister Malone puts her slinky moves on Hudson, the strapping poor boy made good. Toss in impotence, jealousy, alcoholic binges, emotional blackmail, and backstabbing nastiness, mix vigorously with high style and expressionist flourishes, and you've got the most potent melodrama cocktail of the 1950s. Stack twists his arch delivery into the practiced bravado of a boozing womanizer nursing an inferiority complex while Malone sashays and flirts her way through an Oscar-winning performance as a slutty, sassy good-time girl. It's so over the top that it might seem kitschy at first glance, but former theater director Sirk subtly shades his vision in the shadows of film noir and uses the portentous angles and gaudy color to create a vivid, vivacious world of glossy surfaces and social masks cracking under the pressure of responsibility and the pain of lost love. --Sean Axmaker |
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Written on the Wind - Criterion Collection Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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A Zanily Overwrought Camp Delight!!
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"Down there, I'm a guy with too many chips -- throw 'em up in the air and a few land on my shoulders," says tortured playboy Robert Stack, piloting classy secretary Lauren Bacall on a joyride in his private plane. This zanily overwrought classic -- about the mysterious death of the heir to an American dynasty -- had lawyers for the tabacco-rich Reynolds family working overtime. But instead of trying to stop the moviemakers (it's a heavily veiled account of the Reynoldses' son marrying torch singer Libby Holman and then meeting a sudden demise), the clan ought to have sued for a better script: No matter what happened in real life, it can't possibly have been this devinely silly.
"Are you looking for laughs or are you soul-searching?" asks Rock Hudson, Stack's devoted childhood pal, of nice girl Bacall. Actually, as audiences of the mid-'50s already knew, she's out to demonstrate again that she knows how to marry a millionaire. When she and Stack return to the family mansion from their honeymoon, Bacall's alarmed to find a gun stashed under Stack's pillow, perhaps because it's not the only Freudian symbol on hand: they're living in the shadow of the most insistently phallic oil wells in movie history. Hudson's so hot for Bacall that a character quips that Hudson's, er, "torch is burning."
Sizzling out of control, too, is Stack's floozy sister, Dorothy Malone, who ogles Hudson like the slab of prime rib he is, and reveals there's bad blood between her and her brother. "I hate him so," she drawls, "for taking you away from me. I'm desperate for you ... marriage or no marriage." Malone sneaks off from a society blowout in the newlyweds' honor to ask Hudson, "I've changed since we last swam in the raw, haven't I?" When he mutters , "I was an idiot boy then," Malone storms back to the party and achieves Bad Movie immortality by dancing the maddest, most furious mambo EVER.
The madness accelerates when Malone picks up gas station attendant Grant Williams, who tells her tycoon father, Robert Keith, "Your daughter's a tramp, mister." Turned on by all the action, Malone mambos again -- in fron of a framed portrait of Hudson -- as her father drops dead. Then, Malone goads Stack, who's taken to booze when he finds he may not be able to father a child with Bacall, that he'd better keep an eye on Bacall and Hudson. When Stack calls her "a filthy liar," Malone snaps, "I'm filthy -- period!"
It all ends, as of course it must, with gunplay, a courtroom trial, and Malone -- head of the family at last -- crumpled at her father's massive desk fondling a miniature oil derrick. The following year, Malone stood onstage at the Oscar ceremonies similarly fondling her Best Supporting Actress award. Meticulously filmed, utterly sublime, here's the GIANT of Bad Movies So Bad They're Good! |
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Written on the Wind - Criterion Collection dvd movie.