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Written on the Wind (The Criterion Collection) [DVD]
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Additional DVD options | Edition | Discs | Price | New from | Used from |
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Purchase options and add-ons
Genre | Drama |
Format | Multiple Formats, Anamorphic, Color, NTSC, Subtitled, Closed-captioned, Widescreen |
Contributor | Robert Stack, Rock Hudson, Dorothy Malone, Robert Wilder, Roy Glenn, John Larch, Joseph Granby, George Zuckerman, Harry Shannon, Edward Platt, Robert Keith, Douglas Sirk, Grant Williams, Lauren Bacall, Robert J. Wilke See more |
Language | English |
Runtime | 1 hour and 39 minutes |
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Product Description
Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Dorothy Malone, Robert Stack. A very wealthy family is in danger of losing their oil dynasty due to their lack of morality and character. 1956/color/99 min/NR/widescreen.
Product details
- Aspect Ratio : 1.85:1
- Is Discontinued By Manufacturer : No
- MPAA rating : Unrated (Not Rated)
- Product Dimensions : 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 2.72 ounces
- Item model number : 2250558
- Director : Douglas Sirk
- Media Format : Multiple Formats, Anamorphic, Color, NTSC, Subtitled, Closed-captioned, Widescreen
- Run time : 1 hour and 39 minutes
- Release date : March 21, 2010
- Actors : Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Robert Keith
- Subtitles: : English
- Language : Unqualified, English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
- Studio : Criterion Collection
- ASIN : B00005BCK0
- Writers : George Zuckerman, Robert Wilder
- Country of Origin : USA
- Number of discs : 1
- Best Sellers Rank: #40,024 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
- #6,705 in Drama DVDs
- Customer Reviews:
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Based on a novel by Robert Wilder, Written on the Wind reprises a plot motif that had appeared before in Vincente Minelli's Undercurrent and Max Ophul's Caught, recounting the fate of a young woman who unwarily marries an unbalanced wealthy man probably modeled upon Howard Hughes. Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack), an alcoholic playboy given to sleeping with a pistol under his pillow, is the heir to an oil fortune who weds Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall) and takes her back to the family homestead with the intent of continuing the Hadley dynasty. But apparent sterility frustrates his hopes, and when Lucy becomes pregnant, he accuses her of having an affair with his best friend, Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), a suspicion encouraged by Kyle's venomous, scheming sister, Marylee (Dorothy Malone), who spends her spare time sleeping with the town studs.
Freudian family sagas were quite in vogue in 1956, both in stage productions like Tennessee William's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and in films such as Elia Kazan's adaptation of John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Kyle is recognizably a tortured soul in the vein of James Dean's Cal in East of Eden, but the screenplay lacks what a follower of New Criticism would have called an objective correlative. Written on the Wind offers little plausible explanation for its hero's self-destructive behavior. While Kyle's father reproaches himself for having failed to live up to his paternal responsibilities, he hardly seems to have done anything to justify the curse that has descended on his household.
Less naïve contemporary viewers-a fortiori viewers today--might well have suspected other problems lurking behind the false front of Kyle's sterility: both an incestuous attraction to his sister and an unacknowledged homosexual attachment to the more virile and successful Mitch. But nothing of that kind could have gotten past the PCA. When Richard Brooks made his execrable version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he replaced Brick's longing for his dead buddy, the cause of his estrangement from his wife, with straightforward-and sexually straight-adultery between Maggie and Skipper. So Written on the Wind falls back on the stock clichés of the genre, making its enfants terribles into a pair of spoiled rich kids. Nonetheless, Sirk gets away with an outrageously symbolic shot when the film ends with Marylee caressing a phallic-looking replica of an oil well as her substitute for the hunky Mitch, who has eluded her grasp.
Where Brooks changed a serious play into despicable schlock, Sirk was able to inject some class into this febrile soap opera, although with rather odd results. The director's fundamental commitment to aestheticism, a constant of his career, enabled him to treat such an unpromising subject with a remarkable degree of artistic objectivity. In the words of Andrew Sarris, "The essence of Sirkian cinema is the confrontation of all material, however fanciful and improbable." However, Sirks's calculated tastefulness in composing shots, which leaves no detail to chance, clashes with the almost stupefying tastelessness of settings that resemble garish color ads for home interiors or fancy resorts, and unfold before the spectator's eyes a veritable saturnalia of fetishism-commodity and otherwise.
Looking at Written on the Wind almost fifty years later offers something of the voyeuristic pleasure of studying life in the dreary Eisenhower years through a telephoto lens-just as did the protagonist of Hitchcock's Rear Window. At the same time, Russell Metty's color cinematography so strongly accentuates the flamboyant mise en scene that after a while the film begins to take on an oneiric quality-upper middle-class culture as a collective hallucination. But Written on the Wind is no 1960s acid trip like Easy Rider or Performance, and Sirk inscribes his signature indelibly on every image in the film. It is no small tribute to the director's formidable skill as a stylist that in the opening shots he brilliantly establishes the tone of the entire movie that is to follow in what might seem a marginal flourish: the dead leaves that swirl around Kyle and even follow him into the family mansion when he arrives for the confrontation with Mitch and Marylee that will culminate in his death. No harbinger of spring these, the leaves thematically conjoin the mortality of the character, the mortality of an artistic style, and the mortality of the studio system itself in a single breathtaking gesture. At one point, Kyle offers a toast to "The truth, which is anything but beautiful." What better epigraph could Sirk have chosen for this movie!
Top reviews from other countries
belle copie de ce DVD. La piste en VF est un peu en deça de la VO mais ça passe quand même. A voir et à revoir.
So auch in "In den Wind geschrieben" aus dem Jahr 1956 - neben "Solange es Menschen gibt" und "Was der Himmel erlaubt" sicherlich eines seiner größten Meisterwerke.
Seine Filme waren in den 50ern natürlich gute Kinoerfolge - aber bei den Kritikern dauerte es sehr lange, bis man seine Arbeiten wirklich schätzte und sie auch eingehend würdigte. Einer der größten Bewunderer war sicherlich Rainer Werner Fassbinder und Wim Wenders nannte Sirk einen "Dante der Soap Opera", der meisterhaft in der Lage gewesen sei, die Schattenseiten des American Dream in dramatischen Bildern zu vermitteln.
Es sind opulente Technicolor-Schinken, die tatsächlich gewisse Widerhaken in der Story setzen und sich so völlig von der Norm des Genres absetzen.
Vordergründig herrscht die Emotion, eingebettet in Technicolor und Cinemascope. Alles ist irgendwie überlebensgroß und man spürt die Parodie darin. Schockierendes aus dem american way of Life wird mit einer leidenschaftlichen Feierlichkeit behandelt, dies erkannte auch Kritikerpapst Roger Ebert. Er sieht in Sirks Stil, in seiner Übertreibung einen starken Hang zum satirischen Humor und gerade aus "In den Wind geschrieben" lässt sich herauslesen, dass da eine bemerkenswerte Kritik an der 50er Jahre Gesellschaft vorgenommen wurde.
Neben Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson) und Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall), den beiden Normalos der Geschichte, präsentiert Sirk mit der schwerreichen Familie Hadley aus Texas zum einen die selbstzerstörerische, alkoholabhängige Nymphonanin Marylee (Dorothy Malone) und ihren unsicheren, ebenfalls schwer alkoholkranken Bruder Kyle (Robert Stack), ein Playboy wie er im Buche steht. Verwöhnt von ihrem Reichtum durch den Vater und Ölbaron Jasper Hadley (Robert Keith) sind beide Kinder als Erwachsene extrem neurotisch und handeln destruktiv. Da hat es nicht mal was genützt, dass der egozentrische Jasper den kleinen Mitch, der ärmlichen Verhältnissen entstammt, bei sich aufgenommen hat. Nicht unbedingt aus Nächstenliebe, denn Mitch hatte gute Eltern. Aber er wollte, dass seine eigenen verwöhnten Kinder mit einem ganz normalen amerikanischen Jungen aufwachsen, um sich an seinen Tugenden orientieren zu können - Ehrlichkeit, Rechtschaffenheit, Bescheidenheit, Treue, Arbeitseifer. All dies war Mitch und wurde so zum Freund von Kyle. Auch sein Aufpasser, wenn der wieder mal über die strenge schlug. Und Marylee war schon als kleines Mädchen in den starken Jungen, der bei ihnen aufwuchs, verliebt. Aber der liebt sie als erwachsener Mann nur wie seine Schwester. Mit dem Ergebnis, dass Marylee zum stadtbekannten Flittchen wird. Als Mitch und Kyle die Sekretärin Lucy kennenlernen, verlieben sich beide in die attraktive Frau. Da Kyle etwas mehr Verführungskünste auffährt, gewinnt er und nicht Mitch das Herz von Lucy. Die Heirat folgt. Und damit für den labilen Kyle ein total trockendes Jahr. Aber der erste richtige Ehekonflikt lässt ihn dann doch wieder zur Flasche greifen...
Tatsächlich haben Robert Stack und Dorothy Malone die interessanteren Rollen in "In den Wind geschrieben" erwischt. Wobei aber auch Laureen Bacall und Rock Hudson eine gute Figur machen. Stack und Malone schafften aber im Oscarjahr 1957 eine Oscarnominierung in der "Nebendarsteller" Kategorie. Dorothy Malone gewann den Oscar, Robert Stack musste sich aber von Anthony Quinn in "Vincent van Gogh" geschlagen geben. Rock Hudson wurde ebenfalls nominiert, aber nicht für seine Rolle als Mitch Wayne. Der Academy gefiel seine Rolle als Rancher Bick Benedict in George Stevens "Giganten" noch besser. Interessanterweise spielte er in beiden Fällen einen Texaner und in beiden Filmen gings ja auch um Öl. Riesig ist die Farbdramaturgie des Films, dies ist schon in den ersten Sekunden zu sehen. Wenn etwa der betrunkene Kyle mit seinem gelben Sportwagen nach Hause rast und dort ankommt. Er wird von Mitch, Lucy und Marylee beobachtet, wie er aus dem Auto steigt und in die riesige Villa eintritt. Die Tür lässt er offen, so dass Sirk uns ein ersten traumhaftes Bild mit Dorothy Malone präsentieren kann, im lila Outfit steht sie im Gang, der Wind wirbelt dabei eine Vielzahl von Blätter in diesen Flur. "In den Wind geschrieben" bietet viel fürs Auge und lässt die alte Traumfabrik noch einmal auferstehen.