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SOAPERAMA

Today's NYTimes Best 1176 Film was Douglas Sirk's

Written on the Wind (1955)

This film distills months of soap opera into one 100 minute tragidrama.

Every base is touched. Well, most of them. Homoeroticism (suppressed--barely), alcoholism, murder, incest, slander, impotence and miscarriages (they go together, really), adultery, another kind of miscarriage, this time of justice, nymphomania and so on.

It is all rendered in an over the top style which took me right into the center of the mess and catapulted me along with the story so that there was no time to even think through what was happening to the characters or to me.

Robert Stack is the heir of an oil company, the Dad still leads with a benign dictatorship. Stack finds Lauren Bacall in an ad agency and seduces her with his infrequent honesty (not his money god forbid). His best friend and companion Rock Hudson is also in love with Bacall (and probably Robert Stack) and then there is Stack's sister Dorothy Malone, the mean bitch sister, who stirs the pot and keeps things going so that she can have a crack at Rock Hudson.

The film starts with the ending, sort of, and then we go back to see how we got here.

It is really a great movie in that it invites laughs, has a smirk of its own as it tells the story and then somehow made me teary at the end of it.

I missed this when it was around. Too bad. It was a scandal in the 50's. The critics hated it and the people loved it. It was very popular. That is probably why I, wrongly, missed it.

I will give it a 4 out of Netflix5.

Labels: best films