Written on the Wind

Peter William Evans

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781839021305
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

Written on the Wind (1956) is one of classical Hollywood's most striking films and
ranks among Douglas Sirk's finest achievements. An intense melodrama about
an alcoholic playboy who marries the woman his best friend secretly loves,
the film is highly stylised, psychologically complex, and marked by Sirk's
characteristic charting of the social realities of 1950s America. This first single study of Written on the Wind reassesses the film's artistic
heritage and place within the wider framework of contemporary American
culture. Incorporating original archival research, Peter William Evans examines
the production, promotion and reception of Written on the Wind, exploring its
themes – of time, memory, space, family, class and sex – as well as its brilliance
of form. Its vivid aesthetics, powerful performances and profound treatment
of human emotions, make Written on the Wind a masterpiece of Hollywood
melodrama.

1 Production and Promotion

While the narrative faintly echoes Reckless (1935) – though Sirk claims never to have seen the film (Halliday 1971: 115) – the resemblance of Written on the Wind to his own Slightly French (1948), with its focus on siblings and a sister’s passion for her brother’s close friend, is even more intriguing. Sirk recalls (Halliday 1971: 114) it was Albert Zugsmith’s idea to film Robert Wilder’s novel Written on the Wind. Zugsmith’s place in film history as a producer is down to the Sirk films and to Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958). Without these two credits, a reputation resting, say, on Sex Kittens Go to College (1960) and Fanny Hill (1964) would have been less secure. Intimations of a frivolous streak already surface in his approval of Marylee’s self-pleasuring dance with Mitch Wayne’s portrait in Written on the Wind, and his even more risqué suggestion that Dorothy Malone should dispense with underwear for her parachute jump in The Tarnished Angels (Halliday 1971: 120; Stern 1977–8: 30).

According to George Zuckerman, Wilder’s novel had been shelved (bought at first by RKO in 1945, sold in 1946 to International and finally adapted in 1951 after International’s merger with Universal) mainly for two reasons: the Production Code Office’s objections to aspects of the story, and a threatened lawsuit by the Reynolds tobacco family, the presumed inspiration for the novel. Zachary Smith Reynolds (1911–32) was the heir to the family business. His fondness for aviation, and the mysterious circumstances of his death, recalls aspects of Kyle’s situation in Written on the Wind. Convinced a filmed version would be a box-office smash hit, Zuckerman persuaded Zugsmith and Ed Muhle, Head of Production at Universal-International, in more auspicious times, to take it on (Zuckerman in Bourget 1977–8: 27).

In line with generic constraints, studio ideology, the creative team’s priorities, and tried and tested box-office formulae, Zugsmith dispensed with minor plot incidents and subsidiary characters. The latter have different first and family names, the plot is simplified and inserted into a mainly flashback structure. Jasper Hadley’s wife and brother have been eliminated, though both are mentioned at key moments in the film. Among the other significant alterations, Marylee is now much older than the novel’s fifteen-year-old Anne Charlotte (Dorothy Malone was thirty-one). In intensifying Marylee’s psychological damage, and in making her a fully grown woman, the film also manages – through the death of her father as an indirect result of her shameless promiscuity – to draw attention not only to women-centred questions but also to the shock applied to the conservative system through transgression of moral and social standards.³ The film’s Jasper does not shoot his daughter’s rough-trade pick-up and then himself. He acknowledges the comic futility of offering his wife’s surgeon a million dollars to prevent her from dying. His own downfall, as he tumbles headlong down the staircase, while his daughter begins her danse macabre to the deafening sounds of ‘Temptation’ on her turntable, seems like a heart attack prompted by shock and, perhaps, shame. The Hadley siblings have compromised the honour of the family by defying codes of morality and class, the brother’s drunkenness compounded by what the Production Code, the studio itself and several reviewers called his sister’s ‘nymphomania’. Kyle dies, not, as in the novel, by an act of suicide but accidentally when Marylee tries to prise away the pistol he intends to use on Mitch. In the film, Mitch and Lucy are paired off at the end. In the novel, as Reese (the film’s Mitch) and Lilith (Lucy) split up, recognising that her miscarriage and Cary’s (Kyle’s) death would always come between them, Anne Charlotte (Marylee) approaches Reese to deliver the novel’s penultimate lines: ‘Now, Reese,’ she said. ‘Don’t wait or think or wonder. There isn’t time. This is our last chance.’ The novel ends with the sentence: ‘He bent to kiss her and she was crying’ (Wilder 1946: 381).

Zuckerman produced his first draft screenplay in 1955 (Zuckerman 1955 a). This retains some of the novel’s character names, such as ‘Reese’, and includes legends superimposed on the screen: ‘What a man tells a woman … And a woman tells a man … should be … written on the wind.’ The screenplay reads: ‘A night wind chases clouds past an autumn moon’ (Zuckerman 1955 a: 1). Only after a dissolve from this scene does it move on to Cary’s appearance in his roadster: ‘Whitfield [N.B. later ‘Hadley’] Oil Company. Behind the wheel of a Thunderbird is the lone, hatless figure of a man of thirty (superimposed titles and credits begin).’⁴ Dispensing with a lyrical opening, the revised final screenplay (Zuckerman 1955 b) prefers to cut to the chase. This now has the changed names of the characters – Lucy, Mitch, Marylee, Jasper, Kyle, Hoak – but it still begins in the more leisurely way eventually abandoned on screen. Whereas the released cut has eight shots of Kyle speeding towards the Hadley mansion, the revised final screenplay began with a silent scene: a full angle on the exterior of the house, showing leaves falling, followed by an exterior of a window, with the camera dollying into and holding Lucy and Mitch in the frame. Next a second-unit shot of Kyle driving, panning left with him, holding on the Hadley sign, abandoned in favour of the more dramatic sequence that was released.

Equally significantly, the endings of the screenplays vary, but whereas neither the first draft nor the revised final versions bear much resemblance to the released cut, the ending of the revised final screenplay was retained. In the first draft, the screenplay reads:

The door opens. Marylee enters. Shutting the door behind her, she glances about slowly and uneasily as if she felt the presence of ghosts. Then as she crosses toward the rough-hewn desk, she studies on the wall behind the desk, a portrait of Jasper Whitfield in which he is seated at the desk holding a letter opener. As she sits down in the chair behind the desk, she picks up the letter opener and unconsciously copies the pose in the portrait. She seems strangely possessed as she leans forward and presses the intercom buttons. Marylee (with inter-com): ‘This is Miss Whitfield. Would you all come into my office … please?’ She flicks the buttons again. Then she settles back into the pose of the portrait above and behind her with an awareness that she has found a much-needed, sheltering niche. Fade out. The End. (Zuckerman 1955 a: 125)

Compare this with the revised final screenplay, scene 358:

Camera holds on a close shot of an oil painting behind the desk. It depicts Jasper Hadley seated at his rough-hewn desk. The mood of quiet reflection is accented by a miniature, solid gold oil derrick held in his right hand. Camera pulls back, and holds on Marylee at the desk. Her sobbing subdued now, she absently picks up the miniature derrick and unconsciously settles with the pose of the portrait above and behind her, even to the degree of achieving the mood of quiet reflection. (Zuckerman 1955 b: 127)

In the revised final screenplay, two final scenes show Lucy and Mitch in the car, waving goodbye to Bertha the housekeeper, as the gates are shut by Sam, Bertha’s husband. A couple of features of this attempt at an ending deserve attention: the letter opener, and the instructions given over the intercom to her employees by Marylee. The letter opener in the draft itself, like the derrick in the revised final version in Marylee’s possession, is readable as a symbol of transferred virility from father to daughter. Even though her inheritance may encourage – though nothing is certain – substitution of unhealthy attachment to Mitch Wayne with commitment to professional duties as a business woman, we are still expected to wonder how successfully she will manage to free herself from the introjected work-centred patriarchalism and failed social engineering that led to so much misery in the lives of the Hadleys. Marylee seems destined to remain a prisoner of a hellish Texan Huis clos.

Fassbinder, among Sirk’s most fervent admirers, playing on Hudson’s first name, is not alone in reading Marylee’s stroking of the ‘rock’ in her hand (Fassbinder 1972: 98) as an ironic act of sexual frustration. She cradles a symbol, not a real man. Sirk, though, relates the derrick and portrait to the wider concerns of the film:

I added that well – another sign from the whole film – and the portrait, and the whole desk. That’s the way it ended. But then later, long after shooting, Hudson’s agent, I believe, complained about that. So we shot them driving away from the house. It doesn’t hurt the film too much. (Stern 1977–8: 33)

Whether or not these details are attributable to Sirk, their inclusion in the revised final screenplay is significant. The film dispenses with Marylee’s intercom request, a distraction from the silent visual rhetoric of her isolation and despair, and prefers to the letter opener the combined phallic and oil-related significance of the derrick. Moreover, as the film belongs not only to Marylee, so a shot of Lucy and Mitch together leaving the mansion – whether or not dictated by Hudson’s agent – satisfies box-office demand for a happy ending (of sorts) and refers back to Lucy’s appeal to Mitch after Kyle’s assault: ‘Take me away, Mitch. Take me out of this house.’ A familiar Sirkian touch illustrating through the mise en scène of the house the oppression of family life, the scene recalls the end of Sleep My Love (1947), where Bruce Elcott (Robert Cummings) reassures Alison Courtland (Claudette Colbert) in the film’s last line that ‘In a little while we’ll be out of this house for ever’. The ending deliberately resists cohesion. The neatness of pairing the compatible lovers, and the redirection of Marylee’s energy, leaves gaps in the film’s artificial closure. Will the emotional turbulence endured by the characters be so easily stilled? For someone driven out of herself by love and made frantic with despair, the prospect of a return to some semblance of normality seems remote. As Laura Mulvey puts it, ‘the strength of the melodramatic form lies in the amount of dust the story raises along the road’ (Mulvey 1977–8: 54).

Marylee: bitter consolation

Several drafts of the screenplay were submitted to Geoffrey M. Shurlock, the Director of the Production Code Office at the time, between 13 May 1955 and February 1956. The Office’s main grumble concerned the portrayal of Marylee as a ‘nymphomaniac’: ‘We indicated that it would be essential to change entirely the characterization of Marylee, who now appears as a nymphomaniac throughout’ (Shurlock 1955 a). The objection is repeated in a letter dated 7 November 1955 (Shurlock 1955 b). Shurlock develops the point by insisting:

Such a detailed portrayal of a nymphomaniac would be, we believe, unacceptable from the standpoint of the code in as much as it gets inescapably into the forbidden area of an inference of sex perversion. Therefore, it would be necessary to change this girl’s character entirely before the finished picture could be approved. (Shurlock 1955 b)

Two further objections related to the ‘overemphasis’ on drinking and ‘some unacceptable scenes of brutality … specifically the scene where the husband kicks his pregnant wife in the belly’ (Shurlock 1955 b). The screened version changes Lucy’s complaint to Mitch that Kyle has kicked her to ‘He hit me’, but the drinking scenes, like many other contentious episodes, survive more or less intact. Protests about the use of words like ‘hell’ are ignored. And, however unsatisfactory the term ‘nymphomaniac’ as a description of Marylee, part of her life remains driven by a sexual fixation, uttering lines like ‘I am filthy, period’ in response to Kyle’s accusation ‘You are a filthy liar’, and her promise to ‘have Mitch, marriage or no marriage’. Shurlock’s request to William Gordon, Director of Public Relations at Universal-International at the time (21 November 1955), for a ‘line or two of condemnation for her (Marylee’s) immoral behavior, as such a voice for morality is missing from the script and it would be very helpful to have it in the finished picture’ (Shurlock 1955 c: 2) was ignored.

In the mid-1950s, as respect for the Production Code was in decline, and as Hollywood was beginning to test the limits of allowable screened material, Written on the Wind kept company in this respect not only with its contemporaries like Tea and Sympathy (1956), Peyton Place (1957) and Picnic (1955) but also with European films like Et Dieu … créa la femme (1956), as well as contemporary novels and plays that touched on strong or taboo subjects. As Barbara Klinger (1994) argues, Universal-International took advantage of the freer attitudes towards sex, largely ignoring Production Code directives as it sensed a sex-driven box-office triumph. The studio promoted the film, often in publicity provocatively referred to as ‘WOW’, as ‘adult drama’:

A matured Hollywood has begun producing adult dramas based on outspoken themes which, a decade ago, might not have been approved for or by film audiences … Written on the Wind [is] a penetrating exploration of the morals and animal desires of four people constricted by cross relationships … A story of violence and physical corruption within a family in the most revealing detail. (Anon n.d. b)

These 1950s films reveal the tensions of a society in transition. Historians and sociologists have increasingly questioned the monolithic description of 1950s America as one-dimensional. Challenging contemporary and later views that perpetuated the notion of ideological complacency (e.g. Wright Mills 1981), historians have more recently described the country as a society in flux, the seedbed of 1960s movements of liberation. Wini Breines (1992) argues that the 1950s prepared the ground for the 1960s second-generation feminists. The view that Americans in influential positions were too concerned with the Red Menace (Whitfield 1991) has been contested by historians such as Douglas Tallack (1991), who draw attention to intellectual currents resisting conformity. Written on the Wind, like all Sirk’s 1950s films, is clearly readable as a barometer of the country’s winds of social change.

Shooting started on 28 November 1955, and the film was unofficially released in selected cities (Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans and Tulsa) on 25 December 1956, making it eligible for the upcoming Academy Awards.⁵ The final budget amounted to $1,162,320, $78,000 over the original estimate, largely down to shooting over schedule and underestimated costs for set construction, action props, wardrobe, labour, extra ‘talent’ and other miscellaneous expenditure. Sirk was paid $28,000, Zugsmith $7,500, Hudson $27,000, Bacall $100,000 ($10,000 for ten weeks guaranteed), Stack $50,000 (six weeks guaranteed) and Malone $27,500. Unlike the other three principals, Hudson was contracted to Universal-International. Lucy’s wardrobe cost $7,950, Marylee’s $7,000, Mitch’s $1,855 and Kyle’s $1,550. The original actors pencilled in for three of the key roles were Jeff Chandler for Mitch, John Forsyth for Kyle and Barbara Rush for Marylee, but the film seems inconceivable without the stars who actually played them. Robert S...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Overture: The Wind
• 1. Production and Promotion
• 2. Realism, Modernism and Melodrama
• 3. Mise en scène
• 4. Dorothy Malone/Marylee: ‘Enough devil in her …’
• 5. Lauren Bacall/Lucy: ‘A lady, a beautiful lady’
• 6. Rock Hudson and Robert Stack: Cain and Abel
• Coda: The River
• Synopsis
• Notes
• Credits
• Bibliography
• eCopyright