Written on the Wind - Free Movie (Rated PG)

Protected content

Director Douglas Sirk, Protected content , USA
99 min, 35mm-to-digital, colour, rated PG
Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone

The king of mid-century melodrama, Douglas Sirk, helms this deliriously perverse portrait of a wealthy Texan oil family. Trouble erupts when playboy heir Kyle Hadley (Stack) marries the woman (Bacall) secretly loved by his childhood best friend (Hudson), who is himself pursued by Kyle’s sister (Malone, gloriously lascivious in an Oscar-winning performance). The web of desire unfurls as a tale of addiction, nymphomania and twisted jealousy, heightened by lurid Technicolor and florid monologues delivered straight down the line (‘You made me small in my father’s eyes. You made my sister spit at me. Then you stole my wife!’). Sirk’s fevered mise-en-scène extends to the ever-pumping oil derricks that dominate the skyline – erotic emblems of pent-up desire and, in the director’s words, ‘a rather frightening symbol of American society’. Celebrated by filmmakers including David Lynch and RW Fassbinder, Sirk’s cinema of excess laid the groundwork for the prime-time soap opera. ‘I have seen Written on the wind a thousand times and I cannot wait to see it again.’ – director Pedro Almodóvar