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List Price: $29.95 | | Label: Criterion
Salesrank: 33997
Released: June 19, 2001 |
| Our Price: $18.43 |
| Used Price: $17.00 |
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MPAA Rating: Unrated
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Bathed in lurid Technicolor, melodrama maestro Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind is the stylishly debauched tale of a Texas oil magnate brought down by the excesses of his spoiled offspring. Features an all-star quartet that includes Robert Stack as a pistol-packin' alcoholic playboy; Lauren Bacall as his long-suffering wife; Rock Hudson as his earthy best friend; and Dorothy Malone (who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar© for her performance) as his nymphomaniac sister.
Description of Written on the Wind - Criterion Collection:
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
Written on the Wind - Criterion Collection Reviews:
Sudsy soap opera action 
2009-09-11 - The Bottom Line:
Though some revisionist critics claim that director Douglas Sirk was "subversive," Written on the Wind functions best as straight melodrama: if you're in the mood for some great soap opera starring Rock Hudson and Robert Stack which includes impotence, filial jealousy, oil barons, murder, and that great 50's staple nymphomania which clocks in at about 90 minutes, you could scarcely find a better film.
3/4
More Than Melodrama 
2009-03-01 - Other reviewers seem to heap back-handed praise on "Written on the Wind" by describing it as melodrama or soap opera. For sure, director Douglas Sirk had a flair for glitz but I found something a little Shakespearean about this account of a doomed industrialist family. Sirk cleverly telegraphs the events that will doom playboy Kyle Hadley(Robert Stack). The film begins we view Hadley as a spoiled rich brat. As the film progresses it's revealed that Hadley is a man trapped by his own demons and neuroses that aren't really spelled out considering the time the film was made, 1956. That's probably all for the better because it's more compelling to allow the audience to draw their own conclusions. Hadley reaches out to his trouble-shooter played by Rock Hudson and his wife(Lauren Bacall) but despite their best efforts they cannot penetrate Hadley's veneer. Stack delivers probably the best work of his career that will dispell any notions of the monotone Eliot Ness and he is abetted by an alluring Dorothy Malone as Hadley's temptress sister. This may be director Douglas Sirk's most ambitious and best film. Essential is an understatement.
First-rate melodrama!
2008-08-21 - Written on the wind inaugurated formally the series of melodrama but told with tinge of tragic essence about an play-boy millionaire addict to alcohol and his nymphomaniac sister, who are potential inheritors of a financial oil-empire, but that unavoidable will drag down and eventually destroy all what it interposes in their road.
Powerful performances of Dorothy Malone (who deservedly won an Oscar as Best supporting actress and a nomination for Robert Stack as best Supporting Actor, who might be well regarded as the best performance in his lifetime in the big screen).
Douglas Sirk is the same director of the cult movie "Imitation of life" (who inspired to REM in the homonymous song) and whose exerted in Fassbinder is more than obvious.
written on the wind
2008-07-30 - I loved this movie, brings back very good memories of when i watched it with my mom. I have looked forever for it. interesting story line, poor rock hudson to fall in love and have his best friend marry her. was interesting all the kids were spoiled rotten, tons of money and the only loyal one was the outsider that got adopted in.
Written on the Wind
2007-06-27 - Sirk's stirring melodrama about the meltdown of an oil-baron family is a high-strung potboiler mixing rage, impotence, money, sex, anxiety, and murder in one flaming concoction. Visually sumptuous and redolent with garish colors to match the Hadleys' bursting emotions, "Wind" boasts the fantastic talents of Hudson and Bacall as straight-arrow types in a hellish situation. The chiseled Stack is a mess of masculine anguish as hard-drinking Kyle, and Robert Keith is excellent as the Hadley patriarch, but Oscar winner Dorothy Malone takes the prize for her outlandishly catty, slutty turn as Marylee. "Wind" may not be subtle, but it's a whirlwind of (melo)dramatic delights.
