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 about lives of people that are contained to those people's lives, and the emotions they experience, but rarely do the conflicts that drive the stories have consequence outside 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 a 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.
