Come le foglie al vento

Stack should have received the Academy Award for this performance, period. Its a crime that he did not. Amazing how he humanizes a rich worthless character.

Dorothy Malone did earn a well-deserved Academy Award for her performance. In fact, all of the acting in this film is excellent.

The plot begins with a taxi ride, then an airplane ride, then keeps moving on an emotional ride that will hold your interest throughout. You will be entertained!

However, this is only a blatant soap opera. One-dimensional, 100-percent soaper. You might call it the ultimate soaper, because the acting so thoroughly triumphs over the material. Excellently acted, well directed, but strictly within its soap genre. I wouldn't even call it a melodrama (such as "Mildred Pierce" or "Imitation of Life"). While not denying the great entertainment value of this film, you can only imagine what this talented cast and director might have achieved with more substantial subject matter.

I had the pleasure of seeing this lurid chunk of celluloid camp on television last night. It's a candy-bright trash-o-rama about a secretary (Lauren Bacall) who marries into a filthy rich oil family only to find a more general kind of filth under the gloss of privilege and public respectability.

Oddly enough, both Bacall (usually the epitome of strength and gravity) and Rock Hudson are given fairly bland roles, always remaining above the hideously dysfunctional quagmire that surrounds them. They're too "good" to be very interesting. The characters at the opposite end of the spectrum are what keep our attention. Once soaked in alcohol, a pre-Unsolved Mysteries Robert Stack is immensely entertaining as tormented, pistol-waving Kyle, upset over his inability to conceive the children needed to complete the little American Nightmare in rich-people hell.

However, this decidedly cracked soap is dominated by Dorothy Malone as Marylee, the boozed-up, fast-driving slut with the temperament of your average cobra. Malone won a well-deserved Oscar for her astonishing, one-of-a-kind performance--all bulging eyes and twitching lips, like a drag queen in heat, spewing acid at the other members of the cast. From her wild mambo of death (!) to fondling a model oil derrick (!!!), she is a hilarious delight. Aren't the bad girls always more interesting? Other reviews talk about her being "reformed" at the end. I, personally, did not see that. Yeah, she's upset...but with someone like Marylee, how long is that gonna last?

Later parodied by John Waters's Polyester, Written on the Wind is a seamy, steamy don't-miss. In gorgeously saturated Technicolor.

At the Academy Awards ceremony on March 27, 1957, Dorothy Malone won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her torrid, over-the-top portrayal of a spoiled heiress of a Texas oil tycoon in WRITTEN ON THE WIND. The 1956 potboiler, adapted from Robert Wilder's novel , was a veritable three-ring-circus showcasing alcoholism, greed, impotence and nymphomania.

Malone's performance as Marylee Hadley , a lonely rich girl who picks up men to assuage the pain of rejection from a former childhood sweetheart, was representative of the movie as a whole. Mesmerizing to watch even as it resorts to the "lowest -common- denominator" melodrama, WRITTEN ON THE WIND is ultimately the work of one man, the incredibly gifted director Douglas Sirk, an émigré from pre -World War 2 Weimar Germany who left his European theater heritage behind to pursue a career in Hollywood.

An extremely erudite man, Sirk made a name for himself in the 1950's as Universal Studios' reliable director of lavish soap operas, most notably with Ross Hunter's productions of MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION , ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS and IMITATION OF LIFE . Independent producer Albert Zugsmith offered Sirk the opportunity to work outside the limiting constraints of Universal's demure entertainments and create a more adult , "sensational" product , hence the sultry WIND and its follow-up, 1957's TARNISHED ANGELS, both released under the Universal International banner. It's anyone's guess why Sirk didn't pursue loftier themes, but apparently directing these exaggerated dramas appealed more to his artistic sensibilities. WRITTEN ON THE WIND could be considered Sirk's epic soap opera ; indeed, it is so rife with human vulnerability and neurosis as depicted among the very rich that it is as compelling to watch as any real life domestic squabble among the rich and famous, perhaps more so. Robert Stack (not an actor typically known for over -emoting) nearly matches Malone in intensity with his offering of the weak- willed brother Kyle Hadley, a mere shadow of his patriarchal father. When he finds out that he is unable to impregnate his new bride ( a beautifully leonine Lauren Bacall ) , Hadley goes off the deep end, escalating an already serious drinking problem with a "secret " gun fetish that threatens to make him a human time bomb. Both brother and sister, as venal and unlikeable as they are, are presented as victims of their past, giving them a human quality that makes them seem less monstrous ( and far more interesting than the 'good" side of the family, mainly Bacall and the impossibly handsome Rock Hudson , young Hadley's old boyhood friend and business associate, a surrogate son to the old man and Malone' s unattainable object of desire. ) Despite all the domestic co-dependency on display , it's not so much the story that is memorable here as the way it is filmed. With a real panache for pictorial composition and editing, director Sirk draws his audience into this picture with the most heightened Technicolor cinematography imaginable : every single shot in this film is an eye-filling canvas of saturated colors, from the sight of a tank-like pink Cadillac pulling up to an enormous mansion's front doors to the garish decor of a luxury Miami hotel , a spectrum of hues almost blinding in their diversity. Action and dramatic scenes feature Sirk's adept use of tilted camera angles , shadowy lighting and cross-cut editing , shown to greatest effect in the scene where a rebellious , drunken Malone dances uninhibitedly in her upstairs bedroom to the loud blaring of a record player while her stricken father precariously ascends the huge staircase ; the scene is so riveting that you swear you are experiencing a great oedipal drama unfold. What you're really watching is trash of an enormously entertaining kind, gussied up in lurid Technicolor and polished to perfection by a visual genius.

One of the most oddly colored (violets,bright yellows and reds) wildly flamboyant films made in the 50's, expatriate German director Douglas Sirk made this as a soap opera with a nasty satiric bite. Although Lauren Bacall and Rock Hudson as staid camp followers of a wealthy Texas family are the "stars", it's the perverse characters played by Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone who make the film such a vivid nightmare of the Eisenhower era of outdoor barbecues and post-war wealth. Malone in particular, playing a nymphomaniac oil heiress who dances wildly while her father dies of a heart attack, breaks the mold of the sexually sequestered decade.

Robert Stack never really got over losing a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Kyle in "Written on the Wind" to Anthony Quinn's 12-minute performance in "Lust for Life." Stack plays the deeply disturbed, alcoholic son of an oil tycoon. He has lived his life in the shadow of the friend with whom he was raised, Mitch, played by Rock Hudson. They both love the same woman, Lucy, (Lauren Bacall), who becomes Kyle's wife. Kyle's sister, Marylee (Dorothy Malone), is a drunken slut who's in love with Mitch. Their story plays out in glorious color under the able direction of Douglas Sirk, who really dominated the melodrama field with some incredible films, including "Imitation of Life," "All that Heaven Allows," "Magnificent Obsession," and many others.

Make no mistake - this is a potboiler, and Stack and Dorothy Malone make the most of their roles, Malone winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. There's one amazing scene, mentioned in other comments, where she wildly dances to loud music as her father collapses and dies on the staircase. We're led to believe that Marylee sleeps with everyone, including the guy that pumps the gas, because she's in love with Mitch. Mitch wants nothing to do with her. He's so in love with Lucy that, out of loyalty to Kyle, he wants to go to work in Iran to avoid temptation. I doubt he'd be so anxious to get there today no matter how much in love he was.

Hudson and Bacall have the less exciting roles here - Hudson's Mitch is the good guy who's been cleaning up Kyle's messes for his entire life, and Bacall is Mitch's wife who finds herself in a nightmare when her husband starts drinking again after a year of sobriety. Sirk focuses on the more volatile supporting players.

In Sirk's hands, "Written on the Wind" is an effective film, and the big scene toward the end in the mansion is particularly exciting. The director had a gift for this type of movie, and though he had many imitators, he never had an equal.