A Film Canon

Written On The Wind plays like a sequel to the oil western, extending its profusion of grotesque, infantile wealth into hallucinatory melodrama, and its nostalgia for patriarchal sublimity into a barely concealed longing for the phallic potency that the prosperous Hadleys - diminutive father Jasper (Robert Keith), infertile, alcoholic son Kyle (Robert Stack), nymphomaniacal daughter Marylee (Dorothy Malone), and daughter-in-law Lucy (Lauren Bacall) - milk from old family friend Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), "a small rancher, great hunter and throwback to Daniel Boone". To this end, Sirk coyly identifies the audience with Marylee's orgasmic gaze - which, by the film's conclusion, has felt this phallic absence most acutely and literally - allowing Russell Metty to find in it an embodiment of his own lurid cinematography: "You know, for a beautiful girl, you can look real ugly sometimes." This may explain the relatively contained cinematographic palette, which replaces All That Heaven Allows' endless, fractal-like reticulation of the distinction between inside and outside, with a fairly sharp, consistent dialectic between the pinks, reds and vermillions that accrue around Marylee (her car, clothes, bedroom decor, makeup), and the deep blues and purples that suffuse the oil fields, rendering them continuous with outer space, and transforming their suggestive derricks into perhaps the most poetic, self-parodic instance of 1950s domestic melodrama's claims to an extravagant, cosmic import.