Douglas Sirk (1956)
This was the third Douglas Sirk movie in as many years starring Rock Hudson and his presence is – as it often is, in retrospect – puzzling and affecting. But this is the first Sirk film I’ve seen which helps me to understand, a little, the fuss about his work, especially its visual schemes. I’d seen Written on the Wind once many years ago – perhaps on a black-and-white television. At any rate, I was unprepared, in spite of Sirk’s reputation, for the extraordinary colouring of the settings, not just outside – the bursts of flame-coloured foliage, the day-glo red and yellow cars owned by, respectively, the messed-up sister (Dorothy Malone) and brother (Robert Stack) at the heart of the story – but also by the colour combinations indoors. At one point, Lauren Bacall in a green dress is at risk of being eclipsed by the vibrancy of a green lampshade. Considering how the colouring of many big Hollywood films of the 1950s has faded, the look of Written on the Wind, on television anyway, remains sharp and vivid. The combination of the artful lighting, by Russell Metty, and the stylish artificiality of the decor and backdrops has a strongly claustrophobic effect. Kyle Hadley (Stack), the feckless, alcoholic scion of a Texas oil baron (Robert Keith), and Lucy Moore (Bacall), the secretary he’s swept off her feet, arrive in a Florida hotel. The view from their window is so luxuriously fake that it suggests an elaborate mural rather than a world outside their room.
In spite of the brief lampshade challenge, Bacall doesn’t need brilliant colours to shine. She’s often dressed in more subtle tones (Bill Thomas did the gowns) and she wears them all superbly. Bacall, although she gives an unusually nuanced performance here, isn’t a great actress but she is unquestionably a star. The look of Written on the Wind is so persistently startling that it struck me more than once that only someone with her magnetism could compete with the non-human visuals. When Dorothy Malone eventually appears as the sexually voracious Marylee Hadley, she too is more than able to hold her own. This isn’t entirely a compliment, though: Malone incarnates the spoilt rich bitch perfectly but Sirk has either encouraged or allowed her to overplay so relentlessly that she seems to be putting on a show rather than playing a character. It was enough to win Malone a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. She is often amusing but she’s usually ludicrous too.
Rock Hudson moves hesitantly through this cornucopia wearing a brown suit. He plays Mitch Wayne, who Jasper Hadley took a shine to when Mitch and Kyle were boyhood pals and who’s turned into the son the old man always wanted. (Mitch is also still attentive to his own poor-white-trash-but-decent father (Harry Shannon).) Mitch, a geologist, is an exasperated but long-sufferingly loyal friend to Kyle but their relationship comes under extreme strain when Kyle more or less pinches Lucy, with whom Mitch fell in love at first sight, from under his nose. It’s Marylee who’s crazy about Mitch but he tells her he can be only a brother to her. The script, then, supplies Rock Hudson with reasons to look solemn as the gentlemanly Mitch but these are not enough to account for the pall of unhappiness the actor generates. It’s virtually impossible now to resist reading onto his performances the discrepancy between his Hollywood image and his private personality and sexual orientation; the more I see of Hudson, the more I think it’s not only legitimate to do this but clear that he was a better actor than he was given credit for at the height of his fame in the fifties. (And 1956 was perhaps his best year: Hudson’s performance in Giant – a very different drama about Texas and oil – gained him the one Oscar nomination of his career.)
Watching Hudson now, you see not the wooden, inexpressive performer he was reckoned by many to be but an actor unable to perform in the way expected of the film type that he was. It’s as if he couldn’t sustain the fiction of his public and screen persona, even when he was pretending to be someone else in a film. While it might be argued that if he’d been a first-rate actor he would have been able to do this, I get a sense that in dramatic roles like this one Hudson drew on his own miseries and created a truth. That truth didn’t come through because it wasn’t what people expected a he-man film star to transmit. (I suppose I’m suggesting he was drawing on himself because I assume Hudson’s life to have been unhappy and because there’s a recurring melancholy in his presence on screen, whenever the movie isn’t explicitly a comedy.) A comparison here with Montgomery Clift is interesting. Hudson, although I think him underrated, obviously wasn’t the great actor that Clift was; and it was probably no easier for Clift than for Hudson to combine Hollywood stardom with being homosexual. But it was easier for audiences to recognise and accept thoughtfulness and sensitivity in Clift’s performances because those qualities soon became, and were accepted as, an integral part of his screen personality.
Truthfulness is not, of course, a necessary or even desirable commodity in the lushly unreal world of Written on the Wind. It has a rather jarring effect, not only in the absorbing, opaque medium of Rock Hudson but in the more easily readable form of Robert Keith’s strong characterisation of old man Hadley. As the doomed Kyle, Robert Stack is a rather different proposition. Kyle fears that he’s sterile and won’t be able to keep the Hadley dynasty going. The denouement of Written on the Wind depends on his disbelief then paranoid reaction to Lucy’s news that she’s pregnant. Stack gives this juicy part – which includes plenty of drunk scenes – everything he’s got but that’s not too much. His playing is forceful and holds your attention but it lacks variety and surprise. So does the piece as a whole. In spite of the momentum and conviction of Sirk’s direction, the story – from a screenplay by George Zuckerman, based on a 1946 novel by Robert Wilder – is melodramatic trash. But the movie is at least thoroughly melodramatic. Douglas Sirk never lets up from the moment a gale starts blowing for the opening credits (not, at least, until the last few minutes of the film, which are largely anti-climactic). There is a theme song – music by Victor Young, words by Sammy Cahn, both having an off day.
6 July 2012
