Rating:
by Derek Smith 3/17/09

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About an hour into Written on the Wind, Jasper Hadley, patriarch of the Hadley family and oil mogul extraordinaire, discovers his daughter, Marylee, is a tramp.  As she gleefully dances away, drunk and alone in her room, her father stumbles out of his office suffering a heart attack before falling down the stairs.  His life ends, but the music goes on in a terrifying juxtaposition of tragedy and reckless pleasure-seeking.  Judy (Lauren Bacall), wife to Kyle (Robert Stack), Jasper‘s troubled and emasculated son, comes to the top of the stairs to gaze at the aftermath.  Horrified, she immediately turns away, covering her face with her hands, but only for so long as she’s one of the few characters who doesn’t hide from the truth.  Her reaction, however, a desperate need for escape from the real and this escapes inevitable transience, embodies Sirk’s central concern in the film.  A world where money and power are a means only to a fantastical end, band-aids to apply on the wounds of daily living, only the suffering, the pains of unrequited love, of not measuring up, of realizing you want more than you can ever have, that the life you’ve always imagined will remain only in the imagination, is too great to simply cover up.  All the expensive possessions in the world can’t conceal the pain and unhappiness underneath and Sirk, with a brilliant combination of colors and symbols of power, masculinity and potency, reveals the depth of emotions within each one of his characters.  It’s a melodrama indeed, but one that uses its surface materiality to examine the inner stirrings of its central family and the complicated emotional layers bubbling beneath the surface.

The set up is pure soap opera - Marylee loves Mitch, Mitch loves Judy, Judy loves Kyle and Kyle hates himself so much that he can’t love anyone – but Sirk is so skilled at taking the clichés and superficial stylistic ticks of the melodrama and infusing them with genuine emotional depth by peering at the melancholy and desperation inherent in the tragic set-up.  The rift between the characters’ ideals and the situations in which they find themselves sits in waiting throughout the film, like a great abyss threatening to swallow each of them whole.  Kyle’s self-hatred and inability to deal with his feelings of inferiority, especially in the face of his more virile and attractive adopted brother, and Marylee‘s destructive need to possess Mitch spread like a poison, infecting good intentions and true compassion to the point that every act is lethal, sealing the fate not only of the despairing Hadley duo, but everyone whose lives they touch.  The mirage of familial unity is slowly revealed to be fraudulent and money, security, friendship, all the comforts of modern living are unable to cure human suffering in the Sirkian universe – a suffering that much like the wind that bursts through the Hadley‘s front door can only be held at bay for so long.  This isn’t a melodrama content to merely tug at the heartstrings, but one that gains its power from a genuine investment in the characters and careful exploration of its emotional terrain.