Written On The Wind

When Uma Thurman's Mia Wallace orders a 'Douglas Sirk' steak in Pulp Fiction, it means her main course is going to arrive gloriously overdone. A man whose misunderstanding of subtlety might have been attributable to his German background, Douglas Sirk - born Hans Detleft Sierck - really did ratchet the weepie up a notch or two.

However, as the French New Wave filmmakers and modern movie critics have both noted, there's plenty of interesting insight to be found amid the glorious ridiculousness of Sirk's cinema.

Written On The Wind is a good example of how Sirk's florid melodramas also addressed real issues. The plot couldn't be trashier. Best friends Kyle Hadley (Stack) and Mitch Wayne (Hudson) both fall for the same woman, Lucy Moore (Bacall). Kyle marries Lucy to the chagrin of Mitch and Mitch's sister Marylee (Malone), who is in love with Kyle. Kyle in turn fears he might be sterile, only for Lucy to fall pregnant, Marylee's tongue to wag and all hell to break loose. By addressing topics such as alcoholism and sterility, Written On The Wind strayed into atypical territory for American cinema of the 1950s.

Such is the artificiality of Sirk's film (the interiors are overdone, the exteriors clearly shot on soundstages, the performances non-naturalistic) that critics have assumed the director must have been making some sort of comment upon the nature of 1950s melodrama.

Whether this is true or not, it's hard to imagine that Sirk didn't have an inkling that his regular collaborator Rock Hudson wasn't gay. Certainly, the film works very well when taken as a study of masculinity, with Hudson (closeted), Stack (macho), and Grant Williams (shrinking violet-cum-future Incredible Shrinking Man) providing an interesting shorthand for the postwar American male.

Sumptuously shot by Russell Metty (cinematographer on Orson Welles' Touch Of Evil), Written On The Wind is almost a great movie in spite of itself. We should be able to dismiss it out of hand, but such is the quality of the craftsmanship that even if it is only trash, it is trash of the highest order. And if it's a satire of middle class mores then it couldn't have been more savage had it been written by Swift. Not that everyone can see what's so special about it. To this day Lauren Bacall doesn't think much of the movie. Now isn't there a saying about artists not being the best judges of their work?