Written on the Wind

I don’t suppose there is anything very original about this plot. Very rich, widowed, oil man “Jasper” (Ian Keith) has two spoilt grown-up children. “Kyle” (Robert Stack) is a wastrel alcoholic, “Marylee” (Dorothy Malone) is a lady of, let’s say, easy virtue. The son is best friends with the company’s geologist “Mitch” (Rock Hudson) and it’s these two men who meet the secretary “Lucy” (Lauren Bacall). Both take an instant shine to her, and after some vulgar displays from “Kyle” you might have put your cash on her choosing “Mitch”, but for some pretty inexplicable reason she succumbs to what she perceives is a decent vulnerability underneath the gin and corn-liquor exterior, and agrees to marry him. This ought to be the end of things, but “Mitch” can’t get her out of his head, “Marylee” can’t get “Mitch” out of her’s and poor old “Lucy" has to sit back and slowly realise that maybe she chose the wrong man! With toxicity oozing out of just about everyone’s pores, there is a gunshot and then a trial, but will the truth be told or will the venom still thrive? Hudson does enough here, as does Bacall, but it’s really Stack who steals the show as his dipsomania becomes all conquering and Malone, though more sparingly used by Douglas Sirk, who ably proves her character has a jealous streak a mile wide. It’s a melodrama par excellence that contrasts greed, envy, ennui and even a little lustful behaviour from four actors who bounce off each other effectively throughout. It’s also quite a well written drama with just enough nastiness in the dialogue and just enough kindness to (very) occasionally temper that - usually from Bacall, and as we end the film with the scenes with which we started it we have a mystery bubbling under for much of it, too. It’s not a million miles from Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and reminds us just how corrupting booze can be.