Written on the Wind
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Synopsis
Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor expressionism reached a fever pitch with this operatic tragedy, which finds the director pushing his florid visuals and his critiques of American culture to their subversive extremes. Alcoholism, nymphomania, impotence, and deadly jealousy—these are just some of the toxins coursing through a massively wealthy, degenerate Texan oil family. When a sensible secretary (Lauren Bacall) has the misfortune of marrying the clan’s neurotic scion (Robert Stack), it drives a wedge between him and his lifelong best friend (Rock Hudson) that unleashes a maelstrom of psychosexual angst and fury. Featuring an unforgettably debauched, Oscar-winning supporting performance by Dorothy Malone and some of Sirk’s most eye-popping mise-en-scène, Written on the Wind is as perverse a family portrait as has ever been splashed across the screen.
Picture 9/10
The Criterion Collection upgrades their previous DVD edition for Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind to Blu-ray, presenting the film on a dual-layer disc in the aspect ratio of 1.85:1. The 1080p/24hz high-definition encode is sourced from a newer 2K restoration that was scanned from the 35mm original camera negative. A 35mm dye-transfer print, courtesy of the Academy Film Archive, was used for colour reference.
Just to get right down to it this Blu-ray’s presentation looks really, really good! It looks about as crisp and as clean and as film-like as anyone could probably hope for. The base scan has picked up a staggering amount of detail, from pores in skin to stray hairs to fibers in jackets, all of which just jumps off of the screen. Even the textures on a lamp shade in that Miami hotel room are stunningly clear. Film grain is super fine but rendered cleanly, never coming off like noise. Even though the screen grabs supplied here show that the encode has a little room for improvement I still found it to be one of Criterion’s stronger ones as of late, and it translates beautifully when played back on a television: there are no blocky or buzzy patterns evident, nor does banding ever make an appearance. There is a sharp film texture to the image, and it carries on through the entirety of the film.
And let’s not forget the colours, which, despite maybe leaning a bit warm, look wonderful and retain that Technicolor look. There’s a boldness to the reds and blues that was lacking on the DVD, and the yellows, like on Kyle’s (Robert Stack) sports car, look outstanding. Blacks look rich and allow for shadow details, but seem to get a bit heavy in some darker shots, flattening the image a bit..
The restoration work has also cleaned this up beautifully. Revisiting the old DVD I was surprised to see how clean that presentation was, damage not coming off all that heavy, but the restoration work here has been significantly more thorough, a handful of very faint scratches popping up.
It feels like this title has been a long time coming, but I’m happy to say that the wait was very much worth it!
Written on the Wind - Screen Captures
Audio 7/10
Even the film’s monaural soundtrack—presented in lossless single-channel PCM—exceeds expectations. While it's not all that dynamic on the whole I still felt that voices and music featured a surprising amount of fidelity, and everything is crystal clear with the louder sequences never come off harsh nor edgy. It’s also very clean and doesn’t sound to have had any significant filtering applied.
Extras 4/10
If this edition does disappoint in one area it’s in the area of supplemental material, Criterion only including two significant features. One has already made appearances on other home video releases around the world, including Master of Cinema’s Blu-ray for The Tarnished Angels, and that feature would be the 2008, 23-minute featurette Acting for Douglas Sirk. Presenting a new interview with director Allison Anders alongside archival interviews featuring Sirk, producer Albert Zugsmith, and stars Rock Hudson, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone, it focuses on both Written on the Wind and Sirk’s follow-up (using a lot of the same cast) The Tarnished Angels. Through the archival interviews Zugsmith and the actors talk about Sirk as a filmmaker and the actors explain how he directed them, Hudson saying that Sirk made him feel more secure in his acting and Stack saying that the filmmaker was more a "classicist" when it came to handling him. Sirk also shares some stories around his film career, and I found his story around Universal's refusal to sign some new actor named James Dean under contract rather funny, and it was no surprise to learn the studio would come to regret that. It's a nicely assembled piece and worth watching if one hasn't done so yet.
Criterion has recorded a new interview with film scholar Patricia White, who spends 20-minutes going over the film's "complicated interplay of gender, sexuality, and class." The discussion also touches a little on Sirk's style and what it is about his films that has attracted academics through the years, and also looks at a few key sequences, including Malone's dance scene that's edited around another character's death. She even goes over the ending. It's a fine academic inclusion but I can't say it really brings forth anything all that new.
The disc then closes things off with the film's trailer and then a poster insert featuring a new essay on the film by Blair McClendon, which delves into the psychology of the characters. Criterion's cover art is then found on the reverse side.
This one is one of my favourites of Sirk's, so I'm a little disappointed there isn't much else, though it still manages to be a big upgrade over Criterion's old DVD: that disc only featured trailers and a text gallery around Sirk's films. That feature has not been carried over to here.
Closing
Criterion still doesn't give the film a significant special edition but the brand new presentation makes up for it. It looks incredible!
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