306. Written on the Wind (1956)

Running Time: 99 minutes
Directed By: Douglas Sirk
Written By: George Zuckerman, from novel by Robert Wilder
Main Cast: Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Robert Keith
Click here to view the trailer

WOMEN'S WEEPIES

I have to say I'm a little proud of myself. After a vicious slump of averaging about a movie a week, this has gotta' be like my fifth or sixth movie in the past seven days and it feels good to be banging them out at such a rapid pace. It's just too bad they're not all winners...

Kyle Hadley (Stack) is the son of an oil tycoon, a boozer and a wild man with an unpredictable nature. Mitch Wayne (Hudson) is sort of like his babysitter, his childhood friend whom Kyle's father, Jasper (Keith), has always wanted Kyle to emulate. After we get past the opening credits (and that fabulous title song by The Four Aces), we get into the real meat & potatoes and see Kyle & Mitch traveling from their home state of Texas all the way to New York, simply because Kyle wants a steak sandwich. While there, Mitch picks up an executive secretary named Lucy (Bacall) and brings her to meet Kyle at the restaurant - so that if anyone asks, he can skip the part about traveling cross country to get a sandwich and just play it off as a business meeting. Kyle is immediately taken by Lucy (as was Mitch) and tries to woo her with his money, setting them up in five star digs and filling her room with flowers, not to mention the incredible view. Lucy, disgusted by the man who throws his money around, takes off in the night, but is chased after by Kyle. He professes his love for her (after only knowing her for eighteen hours - puh-lease) and bing, bang, boom - the two are married. Mitch is left in the dust, as he also had/has feelings for Lucy. It turns out that marriage was just what the doctor ordered for Kyle, as he cleans up his act, quits the booze and becomes a brand new man. Meanwhile, Kyle's sister, Marylee (Malone) is carrying her own torch for Mitch, whom she's known since they were in grade school. Mitch only looks at Marylee as a sister-type and thus, wants nothing to do with her romantically. Things get heated when the newlyweds realize they can't have children, something Kyle has always wanted.

SPOILER ALERT!

Tell me, how was Dorothy Malone not a bigger star in her time? Men had to be going APE for her back in the day! In this scene she was down to just her underwear at one point - tell me men weren't losing it!

On one hand, the cinematography is great (just peep that picture of Dorothy Malone framed in fall foliage - outstanding stuff!) which gives you something nice to look at during the course of this overblown melodrama. Oh and how about that scene where Jasper takes a tumble down the stairs. Marylee, just arriving home from a night of boozing and probably casual sex, hits her room with a bottle and blasts the stereo. Intercut with this are scenes of Jasper Hadley climbing the stairs to give his daughter a piece of his mind. All of a sudden, Jasper stops, falls backwards down the big spiral staircase and lands hard on the floor below. Up in her room, Marylee is none the wiser, now stripped down to her nightgown and kicking her feet in the air, dancing to the music. FABULOUS SCENE! Speaking of the characters, the cast is excellent too. Believe it or not, all I ever knew of Robert Stack growing up, was that he was that guy who hosted Unsolved Mysteries (he aged really well, didn't he?) and barely knew he was in other stuff as a legitimate actor. I also usually really dig Rock Hudson. If I had to make one cast change, I'd have taken out Lauren Bacall, but that's just personal preference - I realize many loved her work. I don't mean to speak ill of the recently deceased, but I just never cared for Bacall and the fact that Dorothy Malone had to play second fiddle to her here was kind of outrageous. Malone was great - both as an actress and as a beauty. I had to go back to see if I'd reviewed anything else with her and was reminded that she was also Dean Martin's love interest in Artists and Models.

I'm not usually a "car guy", but weren't the cars in this movie pretty great? That yellow one that Stack was driving at the beginning and this red one that Dorothy Malone was making all the more beautiful were quite the standout vehicles.

On the other hand, I tend to agree with whomever coined these Sirk affairs as "women's weepies" back when they were released. This is the cinematic equivalent of watching The Young and the Restless and I'm left to wonder if Sirk was the pioneer for daytime soaps? I just can't settle into these overly dramatic movies, that just seem too fake to get lost in. Also, why did Kyle have to die? I didn't like that. And not only did he die, but then the ending sees his best friend and widow driving down the highway of love, all smiles! I mean, this guy didn't do anything wrong, did he? He meets this girl and marries her (hey, he didn't know Mitch liked her) and proceeds to straighten himself out - no more booze. Then he finds out he's sterile and he loses it - but hey, if the guy always wanted kids, you can't blame him for losing it a little bit. Sure, he jumped the gun a little bit, as the diagnosis wasn't final and more tests needed to be run, but he was upset for God's sake! Okay sure, the whole thing with the gun was a bit excessive, but he was drunk, he didn't know what he was doing! That's not an excuse, but HE WAS UPSET FOR GOD'S SAKE!! Seriously though, couldn't everyone end happily ever after without having to off Stack? I went back and re-read my review of All That Heaven Allows and I had about the same opinion as I do here. Just not into these films and why Sirk's work and these overblown melodramas got rediscovered in the 70s (at a time when films were getting edgier) is beyond me.

RATING: 6/10  When in doubt, slap a '6' on it! That's what I always say. Really though, it's a film that lingers in the mundane - but I still want to see more of Dorothy Malone!

MOVIES WATCHED: 864
MOVIES LEFT TO WATCH: 137

October 29, 2014  8:54am

309. All That Heaven Allows (1956)

Running Time: 89 minutes
Directed By: Douglas Sirk
Written By: Peg Fenwick, Edna L. Lee, Harry Lee, from story by Edna L. Lee
Main Cast: Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorehead, Conrad Nagel, Virginia Grey

UMMM...YES, I'LL HAVE THE DOUGLAS SIRK STEAK PLEASE

Two months later and I find myself back, clickity clacking away at the keyboard, donning a pair of eyeglasses and ready to spew my opinion on yet another one of these 1001 Movies That I, Apparently, Must See Before I Die. My returning film is "All That Heaven Allows", which I viewed a little earlier via the streaming portion of Netflix and why waste time jibber jabbering...Let's get down to business, shall we.

Cary Scott (Wyman) is a mother of two and a widow. She lives a very ordinary life, the type of life you'd expect any good natured woman living in the 1950s to lead. She sees her two, college age children on the weekends, has friends over for luncheons during the week and goes to social gathering with her appropriately aged male suitor, Harvey (Nagel). She also, like many other suburban wives of the 1950s, has a gardener under her employ and one day when her best friend Sara (Moorehead) can't stay for lunch, she invites the gardener, Ron Kirby (Hudson), to join her instead. They talk a little bit and on another lonely day in the life of Cary Scott, Rob asks her to his home, so that she can see his tree nursery. Cary is enamored with Ron's entire existence, his home and his friends. With a bit of a rushed plot, we're pushed forward and soon Cary and Ron are head over heels in love with one another and Ron is asking for Cary's hand in marriage. Of course, there is one little speck of information I forgot to mention - Ron is a much younger man and remember, we're dealing with a 1950s society, where the idea of a younger man and an older, widowed woman, was severely frowned upon.

I'm a twenty-six year old guy, but hey, I've seen "Leave It to Beaver" reruns and I know how persnickety people could be back in the day. It almost seems laughable today to think that this sort of thing would be frowned upon, but I realize that this was probably not just a fictional plot for a lot of women living back then. If you look up the actual ages of Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, you'll find that Wyman is actually only eight years older than Hudson, which makes the situation even more unbelievable. I think that the thing that I could attribute most to this film, is how it makes you think of the societal changes that our world has gone through. I mean, you set a story up like this in 1956 and it's controversial, risque and racy subject matter, but if this film was made today, set in today's society it would be boring and unexciting. To think that the idea of an older woman dating a younger man today, is so socially acceptable that there are television shows about such occurrences. I'm not sure if we've advanced socially or become less conscious about the way we should behave...

"All That Heaven Allows" screams "black and white" and is really a film that I would have rather seen without color. I don't know, it just seems to me that color screams modern and that this is a tale told in a very un-modern world and a tale that needs to be reminded that it exists in an older time period. Of course, then we're fed gorgeous images of snowfall and deer frolicking outside of a gorgeous picture window and I realize that maybe the color wasn't so bad after all. Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson were pretty good and I definitely want to check out more of Rock's line of work. This was a good film, but not something that I'll likely watch again and certainly not the type of film that I'd want to see on a regular basis. Eventhough we're dealing with very adult subjects, I still would say that the film is definitely of it's time and a little bit too "goody goody" for me. It was a good love story, but love stories really aren't my bag. The film DID make me think though, and that's never a bad thing.

RATING: 6.5/10 Average film, but I was looking for something with a bit more of a wallop for my big comeback movie. Oh well...maybe next time.

MOVIES WATCHED: 266
MOVIES LEFT TO WATCH: 735

June 24, 2011 3:04am