from filmsite.org:Written on the Wind (1956) is generally regarded as the best of director Douglas Sirk's 1950s lush, vibrantly colorful melodramatic masterpieces. His absorbing, flamboyant, overwrought potboiler films were noted for their glossy and excessive style, soap opera-ish and brightly-colored film noirish characteristics, and exaggerated and overheated emotions. This film provides Sirk's clear commentary and critique of the underlying hollowness and shallowness of American society in the placid 1950s, and misfit lives stunted and corrupted by mental anguish, alcoholism, sexual frustration, and corruptible materialistic wealth. This vivid, gaudy and slightly campy Technicolor film, from a screenplay by George Zuckerman that was adapted from Robert Wilder's best-selling novel of the same name, centers on the frenzied dynamics within a self-destructing, filthy-rich (literally) Texas oil family named Hadley. The bourgeois, immoral, blood-poisoned, money-corrupted clan is composed of a tycoon patriarch (Keith), an alcoholic, profligate, insecure playboy heir (Stack), a lustful daughter (Malone), and their stable, responsible, less-wealthy family friend and boyhood playmate (Hudson) who supportively holds the family together. Dysfunctional tensions rise when the patriarch's booze-soaked son quickly courts and marries the company's respectable, sensible good-girl executive secretary (Bacall) and his self-pitying fears of impotency (sexual and otherwise) and jealousy - inflamed by his debauched and trashy sister - soon lead to the film's climactic shoot-out (shown in flashback in the film's opening). The film's tagline pronounced:
The story of a family's ugly secret and the stark moment that thrust their private lives into public view!The film includes such sordid subjects as nymphomania, alcoholism, murderous jealousy and rage, phallic power and infertility, miscarriage, back-stabbing emotional blackmail, and illusory materialistic happiness.