Written on the Wind

“Douglas Sirk has made the tenderest films I know, they are the films of someone who loves people and doesn’t despise them as we do,” wrote Fassbinder of arguably his favorite director, a Hollywood-by-way-of-Germany master of the melodrama. Here, Sirk outlines the spills of the dissolute, oil-rich Hadley family, with Robert Stack as the playboy son, Rock Hudson his omnipresent friend, and Dorothy Malone and Lauren Bacall as Stack’s sister and love interest, respectively. “As a spectator I follow with Sirk the traces of human despair,” noted Fassbinder. “In Written on the Wind the good, the ‘normal,’ the ‘beautiful’ are always utterly revolting; the evil, the weak, the dissolute arouse one’s compassion. And then again, the house in which it all takes place. . . . A house with all the props that go with having real money, and in which one cannot feel at ease. It is like the Oktoberfest, where everything is colorful and in movement, and you feel as alone as everyone. Human emotions have to blossom in the strangest ways in the house Douglas Sirk had built for the Hadleys.”

• Written by George Zuckerman, based on the novel by Robert Wilder. Photographed by Russell Metty. With Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall. (99 mins, Color, 35mm, From Universal Pictures)