“Written On The Wind” (1956)
At one time more closely resembling the true-life story of tobacco heir Zachary Smith Reynolds (whose life was also dramatized for the David O. Selznick romp “Restless“), “Written On The Wind” concerns two dirt-bag siblings in Texas – Marylee (Dorothy Malone), a woman of ill repute, and her alcoholic brother Kyle (Robert Stack), both the children of a local oil baron (Robert Keith). Kyle gets involved in a relationship with Lucy (Lauren Bacall), a New York City secretary, while Marylee has a weirdly-defined relationship with Mitch (Rock Hudson), who works as a geologist at the oil site. What follows is a calamitous intersection of personal and sexual misunderstandings, entanglements, and ultimately (this is a Douglas Sirk movie, after all) tragedies. There are about an entire soap opera season’s worth of twists and turns in the second and third acts, and the movie, which is under 100 minutes, really moves. This is one of Sirk’s most brutal movies (even if it is photographed like some lush colorized noir by Russell Metty,) because like in all of his films, Sirk was doing so much beneath the surface that only seemed appropriate at the time because they had the silky imprimatur of studio-approval (including the frank inclusion of miscarriage and, by association, abortion.) And it’s all set to a quite brilliant theme song.
“The Tarnished Angels” (1957)
A type of companion piece to “Written On The Wind,” Sirk’s antepenultimate film again featured the same producer/screenwriter and the trio of Rock Hudson, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone. Shot in black and white by Irving Glassberg and based on William Faulkner‘s “Pylon,” this melodrama exploited the unlikely intersection of aviation and obsessive love in another quadrangle, like ‘Wind.’ “I need this plane like an alcoholic needs his drink,” Roger Shumann (played by Stack) says in his raison d’être soliloquy. Hudson stars as Burke Devlin, a New Orleans reporter intrigued by a peculiar gypsy aviation trio making ends meet in the Depression-era carnival circuit by racing and pulling off stunts at rural air shows. Shumann, a disillusioned WWI vet, cares for nothing but flying. Not even his wife LaVerne (Malone) a daredevil parachutist, his loyal mechanic Jiggs (Jack Carson) or his doting son Jack (Christopher Olsen) can penetrate his compulsion to fly — it’s the only thing in life he seems to do right. Devlin, selfishly only sees a story at first, but soon becomes enamoured of the loveless LaVerene and discovers the true nature of this trio’s already blemished history together. While captivating, it’s perhaps not quite as absorbing as Sirk’s expressive color pictures of the 1950s. Still, it’s artistically ambitious and due for re-evaluation, not to mention a new transfer that highlights its somber and hard-fought mood.