Perhaps the most anxious and lurid of Sirk's incredible run of melodramas for Universal-International, Written on the Wind is a soap opera laid in a Texas too extravagant for even Edna Ferber. Everything is outsized but off-center — big, big oil derricks, shotgun aeroplane weddings, saloon brawls, and a hoochie-cooch pagan jazz dance that embarrasses Old Testament fury. Even a child's bucking bronco becomes a crude-cruel reminder of vanished potency. Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone star as those danged spoiled rich thirtysomething Hadley brats with a Texas-sized deficit of self-awareness and restraint. (Malone won a much-deserved Oscar, in a mind-boggling moment of slumming for Academy voters, for a role described by the Village Voice as a "nymphomaniac, which makes Marilyn Monroe look like Margaret O'Brien.") Rock Hudson plays longtime Hadley hanger-on Mitch Wayne, born with sense and decency rather than a trust fund. Lauren Bacall plays Stack's wife, a tragic witness to the unraveling. "It is like the Oktoberfest, where everything is colorful and in movement, and you feel as alone as everyone," observed Sirk disciple Rainer Werner Fassbinder. "Human emotions have to blossom in the strangest ways in the house Douglas Sirk has built for the Hadleys." - Chicago Film Society

Preceded by: Hold Me While I'm Naked (George Kuchar, 1966) - 15 min - 16mm from from Anthology Film Archives