05.05.05
Movie Review: Written on the Wind (1956)

Nobody does Technicolor melodrama as well as Douglas Sirk.

In the opening scene a bright yellow sports car pulls up in front of a mansion, it’s fall and red and orange leaves are swirling everywhere. A figure gets out of the car, downs some liquor, smashes the bottle and goes into the house, swirling, swirling the leaves in after him. There’s a gun shot, somebody stumbles back out of the house. And still the leaves go on, swirling!

Flashback to a year earlier at the New York offices of Hadley Oil, and the initial meeting of the company’s new executive secretary, Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall) and company geologist Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson. Heh. Rock plays a geologist.) Lucy and Mitch seem to be smitten with each other from the start, but things are interrupted with the appearance of the company’s ne’er-do-well heir, Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack. Just try not to think of “Unsolved Mysteries”), who offers to buy Lucy her own ad agency. Minutes later Lucy, Mitch and Kyle are off to Florida on a private plane. Lucy takes off in the night after deciding, ad agency or no, she’s not going to compromise her honor by sharing a posh hotel suite with Kyle. He catches up with her at the airport, declares his love and they run off and get married. Whew, how’s that for a set up?

Kyle brings Lucy home to the family home in Hadley, Kansas (“Welcome to Hadley, the town and the family.”) At this point we also meet Kyle’s crazy nympho sister, Marylee, who has a longstanding unrequited crush on Mitch.

For awhile things go well for the newlyweds. Kyle has stopped drinking, and they all do their best to keep Marylee out of trouble with the local police. But then Lucy and Kyle realize that they’re having trouble getting baby to make three. The problem isn’t on Lucy’s end, which leads to an unintentionally hilarious scene between Kyle and his doctor, in which he is informed that he has “A certain weakness”. This being the 1950’s, the much less inflammatory phrase “low sperm count” was not available for use. Kyle Hadley, not a man to take lightly having his “certain weaknesses” pointed out, takes back to the bottle.

What will happen when Marylee starts playing to his paranoia about Lucy’s relationship with Mitch? What will happen when Lucy suddenly turns up pregnant after all? Hint: it involves a gunshot and many windblown leaves.