Classic Film Club: Written on the Wind

Each week Tom Huddleston watches a classic film he's never seen before. The rules are simple: each film must be considered a masterpiece and each must be completely new to him. This week: Douglas Sirk's 'Written on the Wind'

The women’s pictures of the 1950s meant something very different from the chick flicks of today: not for them the aspirational, power-suited arena of high finance and high fashion, sisterhood and sexual indiscretion. The films of Douglas Sirk and his compatriots were subtler, bleaker and infinitely braver than today’s ‘Sex and the City’ clones. These are tales of women struggling to find their place in that stifling interim between the great post-war suburban expansion and the birth of the equality movement, a time when middle-class American women had, to all intents and purposes, lost their identity and their purpose. There were schools for the children, offices for the husbands and machines to perform almost every household task; society was repressive and broadly exclusive, creativity was suppressed and individuality frowned upon.

All of which must have made Sirk’s films seem genuinely magical. Here are tales of women carving a niche for themselves, struggling for self-expression, however ill-fatedly. Sure, they may operate within a stolidly establishment framework of matrimony and economic aspiration, but they also showcase female characters who stand alone and stand for something, even if it’s only self-preservation.

‘Written on the Wind’ is a family saga, albeit a truncated one. In its lush, hyperdramatic Southern setting we witness the seeds of American soap, though ‘Dallas’ was never as acid-tongued and satirical as this. The story is a love triangle – between Lauren Bacall’s no-nonsense secretary, her husband Robert Stack, a mass of Freudian impulses, and his dashing childhood friend Rock Hudson, the perfect reconstructed twentieth-century male – with an unpredictable fourth plane thrown in to spice things up: Stack’s wilful, unashamed sister Dorothy Malone, the unchecked feminine id on the rampage. Between them, they play out a series of desperate romantic performances, culminating in an attempted murder and a long-awaited elopement.

For ’50s housewives, ‘Written in the Wind’ must have felt like a double triumph: it doesn’t just showcase the quiet victory of Bacall’s soft-spoken, strong-hearted Lucy, but also shows, in surprisingly frank detail, why she dominates the men who depend on her. Stack’s Jasper isn’t just weak and impulsive, he’s physically hampered by an inability to father children, a disability which cuts right to the core of his manliness. Hudson’s Kyle, on the other hand, may be the perfect, chisel-jawed specimen of manhood, but it’s only by accessing his ‘feminine’ qualities – compassion, understanding, pragmatism – that he achieves his heart’s desire: Lucy. Throughout the film, men are shown to be thuggish, thoughtless, prey to petty jealousy and whim: par for the course today, but challenging stuff in 1956.

On a visual level, ‘Written on the Wind’ is classic Sirk: wildly over-saturated, luxuriating in that uniquely ’50s Technicolour palette, all the skin tones flushed, all the shadows deep, dark and embracing. It’s fluidly photographed and lavishly designed, the screen crammed with explosions of floral colour and vibrant textiles. Despite a brace of Oscar nominations (and one win, for Malone), the acting is fairly by-the-numbers for a golden-age Hollywood studio production, which is no criticism: each one of the central players fulfils their duties with the minimum of fuss, with Bacall particularly enjoyable as the prim but enticing Lucy.

‘Written on the Wind’ is an artefact, a flawless, escapist fairytale from a mercifully bygone era. But it does make one nostalgic for studio pictures aimed not just at women, but at adults: films which don’t focus solely on the joys of shopping and sex talk but celebrate the very real victories of everyday life. But perhaps that’s just the price of liberation.

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