WRITTEN ON THE WIND (77) (second viewing: 70)

Directed by: Douglas Sirk (1956)

Starring: Lauren Bacall, Rock Hudson, Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone

The Pitch: A secretary marries into the hugely dysfunctional family of a Texas oil tycoon.

Theo Sez: A natural double-bill with (say) THE SCARLET EMPRESS - not for any thematic similarity but just for the deliriously over-decorated look, a wealth of visual detail in every frame. As in that film, the elaborate flamboyance serves a purpose, and in fact quite a similar one - illustrating not the decadence of the Russian Imperial court but the gaudy face of untrammelled capitalism, overstuffed with riches but in the end (literally) quite sterile. If the basic message - that the rich are Different - seems the stuff of soap-opera, that's exactly as it should be : it's a film that revels in the conventions of trashy melodrama, counterpointing its grand, overheated set-pieces against the characters' rather shabby problems and using its artifice to underline this tale of deluded people living in their make-believe little worlds. It begins with subversion, a typically wet, lilting ballad ("our lo-ove / Is writ-ten on the wind") played over white-hot images of drunken rage, bottles being smashed and a speeding car skidding and squealing over hairpin bends ; it ends with compassion, a cartoon effect - a rich, lonely woman cuddling a model oil-derrick - given emotional significance. In between is perhaps Sirk's most accessible film (for a 90s audience), at once the easiest and the hardest to take seriously - vivid melodrama in broad strokes, teetering on the edge of deliberate self-parody. It's a rich, astringent classic - but it also works as a bit of high-camp for a Sunday afternoon. [Second viewing, July 2006: Most of the above still stands but the film just seemed rather tedious this time, just on a basic, who-the-hell-cares-about-these-people level. Super-stylish, though, and I don't just mean the pretty colours: the modern-idiot, "Rock Hudson was gay, snigger" brigade are even more off-base than usual, because the whole film is consciously done in code - not just the obvious censor-dodging code ("having fun" for sex, etc), or the code in the artificial banter (as when Stack tells Bacall "I'd never admit this to anyone but you, but ... I drink too much" with a little smile, translation being of course that his drinking is notorious to all), but code in the characters themselves, who are allowed to be cartoonish with very deliberate control. The pre-credits sequence says it all in a couple of images, the sports car careening wildly before a profusion of oil-derricks, the flashing "H" on the refinery followed by the town's name, Hadley - a company town, owned by out-of-control rich people - followed by each of the four main actors appearing under their credit, as if being introduced onstage; the rest of the film then complicates that theatricality, first by undermining the glamour of careening sports cars (these lives are sterile) then allowing sadness to creep in. Sirk's trump-card is the final switcheroo, when the film turns out to be Malone's story rather than Hudson's or even Stack's - blowsy tramp turned heir apparent, last of the Hadleys, having in the same action redeemed herself and relinquished any claim to her childhood dreams; all she has left is her money, and her memories. Cartoon woman turns into a tragic figure, yet it's accomplished by stylisation instead of earnest humanism: the campy brashness - unreal colours, childhood voices sounding by the river, witnesses at the trial called one after the other without any pretence of 'realism' - is like an explosion, dynamiting the plot to uncover hidden complexity. If only they could also replace it with another plot...]