Written on the Wind

If you take off your glasses and turn down the sound, Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind (1956) becomes a war waged between various colors.  Brilliant red wanders about the screen, sometimes flourishing as two diagonally opposed points.  Sometimes, blotches of red appear and, then, disappear only to reappear moments later.  An insinuating system of greens infiltrates the color fields that are salmon or pink or mauve, but always in counterpoint to splashes of eye-catching scarlet.  At the end, after a sort of frenzy in naugahyde-red and burgundy black comes to predominate -- willowy stacks of black sway on the screen punctuated with bursts of white light representing diamonds or hyphenated strands of pearl.  Written in the Wind is Sirk's most excessive and exuberant film -- the old German expressionists were handicapped because they had to work in shadows and black and white.  Sirk, who originated in German Expressionism, can use shadows, and does, but he has an extraordinary palette of colors to spray all over the screen --  there are walls and corridors in Written on the Wind, particularly in a Miami beach-side luxury hotel (with all the accoutrements of a New Orleans bordello) that are decorated in pastel colors that bear no relationship to anything in nature.  The film is stylized to the point of no return -- the color combinations compete with the mere human actors for the attention of the viewer and, generally, it is the colors that prevail.  If you put back on your glasses and watch the actors, principally Robert Stack and Rock Hudson who are poured like molten caramel over the harder and more angular women: Lauren Bacall and Dorothy Malone, you will see a spectacle of a different order, but, nonetheless, aligned with the battle of the colors:  super-stylized performances more archetypes than individuals, but nonetheless effective portrayed:  Robert Stack is the weak rich kid, his face always melting into various species of pathos or ineffectual rage, Rock Hudson as the soft, pillowy masochistic best friend, the maternal bosom offered to Robert Stack, Lauren Bacall as the hard-edged, self-assured virtuous woman, and Dorothy Malone as the infantile nymphomaniac.  These figures no less than the colors that they wear or with which they interact are part of the film's remarkable palette.

There's a plot, very swiftly and efficiently developed -- the film is shorter than I remembered, about ninety minutes, I think.  Rock Hudson (Mitch) is best friends with the richest man on earth, the scion of the Hadley oil fortunes, Kyle (Robert Stack).  The Hadley's make the Rockefellers and Standard Oil look like mere pikers -- they live in their own town, Hadley, with their own police force amidst and endless forest of matte-painted oil derricks.  A petrochemical haze hangs over this infinitely large oil-patch and, right in the middle of Main street, and in the backyards of the taverns, there are huge black hammer-shaped pumps rhythmically rising and falling.  (No one seems to live in Hadley and it has no residential neighborhoods -- it's just a tavern called the Cove, a bunch of gun shops labeled aggressively GUNS, and a country-club where women in remarkably colored evening gowns dance).  In some generic city -- big skyscrapers with shadowy and elaborate set-backs -- Mitch courts Lucy, a modern woman who is an assistant in an advertising firm that is devising a campaign for Hadley Oil.  But Kyle sweeps into the agency -- anything Mitch has Kyle is authorized to take from him and, so, smitten with Lucy, he tries to dump Mitch (unsuccessfully -- he sends him to buy cigarettes like an errand boy) and, then, flies Lucy and Mitch to Miami in the company plane.  It's like a flying corporate board room.  In Miami, Kyle tries to buy Lucy's affections but, unlike all the other floozies with whom he's associated, she takes a cab back to the airport to fly home.  Kyle, then, really turns on the charm and Lucy marries him.  Poor Mitch, as always, is left behind. 

The main characters, then, adjourn to Hadley where things really get gothic.  Kyle's sister, the nymphomaniac Marilee, loves Mitch but Mitch disdains her -- she's too wild and promiscuous for him.  She's always running off with roughneck oil-patch workers which precipitate barroom brawls that the feckless Kyle begins but that the beefcake Mitch has to end.  When Mitch rejects poor Marilee yet another time, she withdraws to her room at the family mansion, strips down to her skivvies and literally dances her father to death -- she puts a large portrait of Mitch on her windowsill and shimmies and twerks barbarically to the image, something that causes her poor dad to fall down the enormous curving stair steps in the mansion (it's a vast set the size of an airplane hangar with a parabola of steps leading up to the unimaginably remote second floor.)  Kyle who is dipsomaniac begins drinking again, straight corn liquor that he buys from a surly bartender at the Cove, a bar sitting right in the middle of the oil patch.  Marilee is tooling around in her red corvette.  She despises Lucy and taunts her, but Lucy, who is no shrinking violet, taunts Marilee back.  Marilee decides to ruin Lucy's marriage to Kyle after Mitch once again rejects her.  She encourages Kyle to believe that Lucy and Mitch are having an affair.  Kyle has a yellow corvette that he drives wildly here and there, skidding around corners.  Kyle sleeps with an ivory-handled gun under his pillow, presumably a substitute for his penis that doesn't work too well -- he's shooting blanks; Lucy wants to have a baby but can't conceive although it's not her problem -- the gun fetishist Kyle is the one who is sterile.  Then, suddenly, Lucy gets pregnant.  Marilee spreads the rumor that the infant will be Mitch's kid.  Kyle then gets completely drunk and beats up Lucy, inducing a miscarriage.  By this time, the African-American servants are terrified -- "there's gonna be a killing," the maid announces.  Kyle finds s gun, fights with Mitch, and ends up shot in the belly.  As if all the sexual issues aren't enough, Mitch and Kyle both recall when they committed some kind of infraction involving a Mr. Daley.  Kyle, of course, was the bad boy and did the wicked thing.   But Mitch got the beating.  Mitch has always been Kyle's whipping boy.  Kyle dies drunk, but remorseful.  Mitch is accused of murder.  Marilee blackmails Mitch suggesting that he can save himself by agreeing to marry her.  Mitch, of course, seems somewhat homosexual -- his real love was Kyle -- and so he has no trouble rejecting Marilee coarse, if immensely erotic, charms.  Marilee, dressed up wearing a black hat about the size of a dachshund and her mourning clothes studded with diamonds and pearls. goes to the inquest.  She is about to lie to punish Mitch for rejecting her, but, then, gnawing on her voluptuous lower lip, she realizes that she truly loves Mitch and cant' destroy him and so she tells the truth, although this means that he will depart (probably to Iran to work for Transamerican Oil) with his true love, the boyish and wasp-shaped Lucy.  Poor Marilee retreats to the family mansion where there is a big painting of her dad stroking his erection, a phallic-looking oil derrick.  The actual toy derrick is sitting on a table.  Under the picture of Dad and derrick, Marilee caresses the toy derrick, all but licking it, and the movie ends with the African-American servants rather sorrowfully shutting the monstrous iron gates to the Hadley family estate. 

In his other pictures, Sirk periodically indulges himself in a sequence involving flamboyant visual effects and searing colors -- he sometimes comes unhinged and slips into delirium as in, for instance, the funeral scenes in Imitation of Life.  Written on the Wind is delirious from beginning to end.  Revelations about  Rock Hudson's sexuality, not available to audiences in the fifties when Sirk's many films with Hudson were made, simply deepens the characterizations and makes these films all the more intense from a psycho-sexual perspective.  Fassbinder adored Written on the Wind and aspired to remake it (or something very much like it) in most of his films.  He never quite succeeded to the extent that Sirk succeeds -- but, then, he didn't have actors like Dorothy Malone, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack and, the greatest of them all, Rock Hudson.