Tuesday, February 17 at 7:00 PM – Music Box Theatre – 3733 N Southport Ave
Tickets: $11 at the door or purchase in advance
WRITTEN ON THE WIND
Directed by Douglas Sirk • 1956
Perhaps the most anxious and lurid of Sirk’s incredible run of melodramas for Universal-International, Written on the Wind is a soap opera laid in a Texas too extravagant for even Edna Ferber. Everything is outsized but off-center — big, big oil derricks, shotgun aeroplane weddings, saloon brawls, and a hoochie-cooch pagan jazz dance that embarrasses Old Testament fury. Even a child’s bucking bronco becomes a crude-cruel reminder of vanished potency. Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone star as those danged spoiled rich thirtysomething Hadley brats with a Texas-sized deficit of self-awareness and restraint. (Malone won a much-deserved Oscar, in a mind-boggling moment of slumming for Academy voters, for a role described by the Village Voice as a “nymphomaniac, which makes Marilyn Monroe look like Margaret O’Brien.”) Rock Hudson plays longtime Hadley hanger-on Mitch Wayne, born with sense and decency rather than a trust fund. Lauren Bacall plays Stack’s wife, a tragic witness to the unraveling. “It is like the Oktoberfest, where everything is colorful and in movement, and you feel as alone as everyone,” observed Sirk disciple Rainer Werner Fassbinder. “Human emotions have to blossom in the strangest ways in the house Douglas Sirk has built for the Hadleys.” (KW)
99 min • Universal International Pictures • 35mm from Universal
On February 16, 2011 we held our first-ever screening. We had about $250 in our bank account and we spent it all to rent Universal’s print of Written on the Wind. We’re celebrating our 15th birthday with a reprise!
Preceded by: “Hold Me While I’m Naked” (George Kuchar, 1966) – 15 min – 16mm from Anthology Film Archives
“A color bath of sparkling sensuality surrounded by the frigid porcelin [sic] of white virginity unable to break free because of drain cloggage. It foams with heady lather of truth completely unrinsed by mineralized morality in non-breakable plastic tubes that never leave unsightly bathtub ring. Zesty color, that makes you nice to be near, helps to elevate this flowring [sic] film to the level of liquid conciousness [sic] that is so poignant it floats!” – George Kuchar
NEXT UP: YOUNG MR. LINCOLN on Sunday, 3/1 at the Gene Siskel Film Center