Critics reviews

The suddenly more shocking colors, loud music [. . . are] wonderfully effective, but the following scene of Marylee and Mitch riding in her car against a back projection screen takes it down a notch—relative to the previous scene, the dialogue is almost reflective and both actors impressively restrained in their ways, linking the film back to the more quiet, however dramatic, earlier scenes with Mitch, Lucy and Kyle.

Forbidden romance, in all its color-coded meticulousness, propels Todd Haynes's Carol, but it belongs to Sirk. Written on the Wind is, perhaps, the most realized execution of the once-lambasted weepie-monger's flair. While laughably campy (especially in its archaic sexual subtext), the film circles the very fragility of artifice; everything perfectly arranged must crumble.

Sirk's most full-blossomed achievement may well be his 1956 film "Written on the Wind"... His vision of the self-consuming whirlwind is anchored by a still and unshakeable philosophical center, even if, in "Written on the Wind," finding it is a narrative version of "Where's Waldo?" Yet that very elusiveness of originary inspiration is itself part of Sirk's ironic genius.

A sardonic critique of wealthy family life in America, and a picturesque melodrama, sowing the seeds of soap opera. But Sirk and longtime cinematographer Russell Metty develop a mood of understated lust with a truly ensemble cast led by Rock Hudson, in his sixth Sirk collaboration, and the overwhelmingly venerable Ms. Lauren Bacall as Lucy Moore, the newest member of the Hadley clan.

Working within and against the conventions of genre, Sirk's over-the-top excess forces the recognition of fissures and cracks that lurk within the dominant ideology the film superficially endorses. The glossiness and artificiality of Sirk's surfaces gives way to a complex meditation on the contradictions of gender, class, and sexuality.

[Sirk] is both a supreme stylist of the cinema, and one whose mise en scène is always in touch with his characters, carrying in image the emotion they fail to articulate in so many words. As he says of the penultimate shot in Written on the Wind: "Malone has lost everything. And I have put a sign there indicating this—Malone, alone, sitting there hugging that goddammed oil well, having nothing. The oil well which is, I think, a rather frightening symbol of American society.

Sirk plays it as a conspicuously fierce critique of a particular sector of American society, the disintegrating middle class, but one in which all the sympathy goes to the 'lost' children rather than to the straights. The acting is dynamite, the melodrama is compulsive, the photography, lighting, and design share a bold disregard for realism. It's not an old movie; it's a film for the future.

Written on the Wind is not simply epic trash but meta-trash. As the pulp poetry of the title suggests, it's about the vanity of trash, set in a world Sirk finds poignantly innocent. This is the land of simulacrum, a hall of mirrors in which the reflection of an image substitutes for the image itself. The last shot is of a black servant closing the gate; you expect him to roll up the lawn and strike the set.

One of the most remarkable and unaccountable films ever made in Hollywood, Douglas Sirk's 1957 masterpiece turns a lurid, melodramatic script into a screaming Brechtian essay on the shared impotence of American family and business life. Sirk's highly imaginative use of color—to accent, undermine, and sometimes even nullify the drama—remains years ahead of contemporary technique.