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Written on the Wind - Criterion CollectionRating:
Release Date: 19 June, 2001 Retail Price: $29.95 OUR Price: $26.99 You SAVE: $2.96! Cast: Complete Cast (12 total) |
Written on the Wind - Criterion Collection Reviews
Beyond camp, but I love it
Is WOTW delicious camp, or the piece de resistance in an underrated filmmaker's oeuvre? Ask film critic Molly Haskell, a bright woman whose opinions I value, and you get the standard glowing description of Douglas Sirk the auteur, using color (and how) to illustrate character, and all the rest of it. Okay, Molly, but fess up -- this movie is pure, unadulterated, 100% trash. And isn't that why we love it so?
(Well, that, and the subtext of gay Rock Hudson playing the manliest man imaginable, in love with his best buddy's wife, so studly that a reporter notices the lovesick Rock's "torch is burning"!)
What Ms. Haskell wouldn't admit, during an interview with TCM's Robert Osborne, is that (a)All this melo can't really support the movie's itty-bitty crisis, namely that Stack's character has a low sperm count (of course his doc can't tell him that; this is the 50's -- so he looks Stack in the eye and says "You have a weakness", and (b) Malone and Stack's performances as the bad-boy/bad-girl Hadley sibs may be insanely watchable, but they're also terrible. Stack, one of the most wooden of actors, tries to rev up the emotion and it never rings true; reviewers at the time gave him raves, mostly for effort, I suspect. And Dorothy Malone's performance (it won an OSCAR?) leaves one speechless. What could director Sirk possibly have told Malone to do during that priceless scene at the water hole, where her character is recalling how she and Rock Hudson used to swim in the good old days, and she loved him, and he loved her, and ... Malone allows so much nostalgic emotion to explode across her face that the viewer is simply stunned (what is that thing she's doing with her MOUTH?). I'll give Malone this -- the girl dances an impressive (if hilarious) mambo, which fortunately for the viewer she does at every opportunity.
I'll just add that the movie's unintentionally risible tone is set in the very first scene, with Stack's character drinking and driving wildly, on his way to confront his supposedly faithless wife and buddy. The soundtrack swells and builds, the opening credits begin to roll, and just when Stack is ready to jump out of his car and get the action rolling ... here come the Four Aces, one of the 50's less talented boy groups, crooning the gloppy title song (for which Victor Young should have surrendered his ASCAP card). Talk about a letdown! Except it isn't, of course. What better way to kick off the perfect trash movie?
I'll give Ms. Haskell this: WOTW is melodrama of the highest order. The big budget really shows. But beautifully dressed trash is still trash, and for that we WOTW fans will be forever grateful.
oh rock, we cant go on meeting like this ...
arguably the best douglas sirk movie (i might prefer "imitation of life" but i havent seen it in eons), with frequent star rock hudson as the central figure of numerous love triangles. robert stack, lauren bacall, and dorothy malone all long for rock (tho one of them only unsaid -- hey, it WAS the 50s). as usual in a sirk movie, the scenic design is as much a character as any person, and the look of both 50s nyc and small oil town texas is perfect. sophisticated soap opera is what they once called it; well, ok ...
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