Blu-ray Review: Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind on the Criterion Collection

Camp just blossoms bigger in Texas. At least, that’s how it feels throughout Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind, even taken in the context of his other supersized ’50s sudsers like All That Heaven Allows, Imitation of Life, and Magnificent Obsession. Unlike those other three films, all spectacular hits in their era that can now be appreciated by squares and hipsters alike, Written on the Wind wears its crassness as a badge of honor, revels in the bad behavior of its purported antagonists rather than tut-tutting their venal excesses, and comes as close as any of Sirk’s major works to flipping the script on which characters most deserve the audience’s sympathies.

That last point is a wavelength that Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in one of the finest pieces of film criticism that Sirk ever received or a filmmaker ever penned, picked up on and advanced in his own ever more perverse string of classic variations on the melodramatic form. In his analysis, Fassbinder writes: “In Written on the Wind the good, the ‘normal’, the ‘beautiful’ are always utterly revolting; the evil, the weak, the dissolute arouse one’s compassion. Even for the manipulators of the good.”

In a nutshell, the film traces the downward trajectory of the inhumanly wealthy oil family of siblings Kyle (Robert Stack) and Marylee Hadley (Dorothy Malone, in a pink lip-smacking, Oscar-winning performance). The family patriarch, Jasper (Robert Keith), has clearly failed to instill in his heirs any sense of moral obligation, and pretty overtly favors Kyle’s best friend, Mitch (Rock Hudson), over his own son. So, too, for that matter, does Marylee, who has spent her entire post-pubescent life draping herself all over an otherwise stoically unmoved Mitch. So she offsets her thwarted libido by gallivanting around their spare, industrial Texas town, hoping that maybe, just maybe, Mitch’s sense of duty will someday kick in and he’ll marry her.

Enter Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall), the sultry-saintly secretary whose courtship with Kyle and simultaneous kinship with Mitch proves to be the catalyst for breaking the Hadleys’ sexual stalemate. Fassbinder astutely pegged Hudson’s Mitch as “all in all the most pig-headed bastard in the world,” and one’s easily tempted to slot the increasingly judgmental Lucy right alongside him. Both spend the bulk of the film making a vice of virtue, with Lucy in particular holding her temperance and level-headedness over the impetuous Kyle’s screwed-up head.

As Fassbinder noted, the more Kyle sinks into drink, the more Lucy abstains from not just the bottle but the nipple too. Indeed, their entire frigid marriage is a daily program of the ways that she needs none of what he has to offer—a reality that metastasizes right into the marrow of their relationship when a doctor informs Kyle that, no, there’s nothing wrong with his wife’s womb. The fault of their childless existence is entirely his own, and it’s a revelation that’s capped off by possibly the most overtly garish Freudian externalization of internal conflicts that Sirk ever filmed: a romper-wearing tot lasciviously riding a coin-operated horse.

Sirk painted the plight of All That Heaven Allows’s young widow being symbolically buried alive in the suburban tomb of a house that her late husband left her, and Imitation of Life’s young Black woman passing for white at the cost of her own relationship with her mother, in reasonably subtle strokes that emphasized the relatable ironies of American life. In Written on the Wind, though, he fully gives into the material’s brashest possible outcomes. For one, it’s not enough that Marylee, late in the film, has to testify in court against her own selfish interests—she does so while also wearing a black hat the size of a circus tent.

The result is a film that’s easy to mine for its Brechtian distances mostly because there’s so few viable alternatives. If Written on the Wind is undoubtedly Sirk’s giddiest trash entertainment, it’s also the shallowest example of his less-heralded humanist acuity.

Image/Sound

Truly, the biggest bummer of this set is that it isn’t among the titles that Criterion pushed forward to the world of 4K, because the transfer (admittedly sourced from a 2K restoration) is so eye-popping that you naturally wish it could’ve been that slight nudge greater, especially in some of the film’s darker scenes, as when Marylee is shown trying to rouse Mitch into a tryst while the pair have ducked out of a wild party and into a quiet bedroom. As it is, the transfer is still a major improvement from the DVD Criterion released roughly 20 years ago, which at the time was arguably one of their finest transfers to date. The sound isn’t such a significant step up, but it’s hard to imagine how much better it could sound given the age of the film.

Extras

While not quite the disappointment of not going full 4K for the film, the extras for this release do pale compared to those for All That Heaven Allows and Magnificent Obsession, both of which included an entire extra feature film (Rock Hudson’s Home Movies and John M. Stahl’s original version of Magnificent Obsession, respectively) along with full commentary tracks. In total, there’s a short documentary look at the acting in Douglas Sirk’s films, with old interview footage from most of Written on the Wind’s cast members, and an interview with film scholar Patricia White on Sirk’s genre considerations. There’s also a remarkable essay on the film from critic Blair McClendon, but it’s presented in that giant, folded poster format that Criterion’s still holding onto like an accursed habit. Nothing included here is by any stretch unwelcome, just cumulatively halfway-there for such a highly anticipated reissue.

Overall

Any time a film scholar tries to steer a Sirk conversation into dry academicism, remind them that, in Written on the Wind, a character rhumbas her father to death.