Melodrama Watch: Written on the Wind (1956)

Watched:  07/11/2026

Format:  Criterion

Viewing:  First

Director:  Douglas Sirk

I've been pretty plain that - while I rarely think a Sirk movie is aimed at me - I think he's a good director and makes some interesting films.  He was considered the master of a certain kind of melodramatic "woman's film", and I don't generally mean the term melodrama in the derogatory sense.  They're simply dramas contained to the character's lives, focusing on the emotions they experience.  Rarely do the conflicts that drive the stories have consequence outside of the sphere of the main characters. 

But Written on the Wind (1956) is both the most melodramatic of his films I've seen in the way we mean the term these days.  It is big feelings playing out in a way that feels like an alternate pilot for TV's Dallas as much as anything.  

It is also the horniest of Sirk's movies I've seen thus far - a movie entirely about sex that cannot say the word "sex" and instead relies on cloaked language and imagery as subtle as a 95 mph fastball to the noggin.  For example:  when a certain character is in flagrante delicto at a motel room, in the foreground of the frame, an oil pump is hard at work.  

The story is that Rock Hudson meets Lauren Bacall in a New York advertising firm, takes her to meet his pal Robert Stack and Bacall goes for Stack (I don't buy it, except he's an oil tycoon and Hudson is not).  Stack marries her and they all return to the oil town in Texas where Stack's family owns the works.  

Back home, Stack's sister - Dorothy Malone - wants to be on Rock Hudson so bad, she's kind of gone nuts and is now sleeping her way through town (see: aforementioned pumping imagery).  Hudson is in love with Bacall, but doesn't let it show.  

Stack finds out his boys don't swim, and goes crazy.  No, really, that's the big pivot to act three.

It's a movie, as I say, about who wants who, what is manhood, how wild would you go if you found out you had fertility issues, and what's wrong with Dorothy Malone, anyway?  (Nuthin'! I contend.  Absolutely nuthin'!).   

If you came to see a sumptuous Douglas Sirk movie, this is that.   The color palette is painterly, the costuming exquisite, the hair impeccable.  The sets are a mix of Sirk-ian woods, mansions and then what I guess is West Texas not-Midland.  I have no knocks about the visuals of this movie - it looks like 1950's print ads in Good Housekeeping and illustrations from Saturday Evening Post come to life.   

Rock Hudson is Rock Hudson.  If that's what you want, that is what you get.  He's the quiet middle of the movie holding things together.  Robert Stack plays a mad drunk we know if goin to fall apart because of the movie's flashback structure and because everyone keeps talking about how great it is he's sober.  Lauren Bacall sleepwalks her way through this one - not given much to do other than worry about Stack and look phenomenal in dresses.  And Dorothy Malone just plays batshit crazy, all but shaking her pelvis at Hudson.  It's like she's in a different movie, but in the most entertaining way possible (but for me - not for making the movie work).  

Anyway, no, I don't understand why Hudson turned her down.  We can tell he was fine with her at one point.  And one thinks, well, my guy...  if nothing else you'd be marrying into millions with a hot lady who keep yelling about how much she wants you. The downside is that she's crazy, but at least everyone already knows that.

It is, in some ways, an entire movie about how Dorothy Malone is less appealing than Lauren Bacall.  I guess with The Big Sleep, that's twice I've been given this message.

My recommendation, be like Weird Al.   

This is also a reminder that one of the great things we had in the 1950's that people are so fucking hot to return to were "morality laws".  A major plot point - that kills Stack and Malone's dad - is that Malone is arrested for having consensual sex outside of marriage, in private.  She then dances to *jazz*.  It's just too much for the old guy.

At the movie's end, our hero leaves for Iran.  I am sure everything remained great there and nothing ever went wrong.  And Dorothy malone is left clutching a bronze oil derrick statue as he departs.

Anyway - if you want to see a movie that is not shy about oil derrick = dick, I have the movie for you.  

I want to give movies like this a shot knowing the context of the time, I was never the audience, etc...  but sometimes, man.  Sometimes these things just age like blue cheese in the sun for a month.