Written on the Wind

Plot

Mitch Wayne is a geologist working for the Hadleys, an oil-rich Texas family. While the patriarch, Jasper, works hard to establish the family business, his irresponsible son, Kyle, is an alcoholic playboy, and his daughter, Marylee, is the town tramp. Mitch harbors a secret love for Kyle's unsatisfied wife, Lucy -- a fact that leaves him exposed when the jealous Marylee accuses him of murder.

About Written on the Wind

Written on the Wind is a 1956 American Southern Gothic melodrama film directed by Douglas Sirk and starring Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, and Dorothy Malone. It follows the complicated relationships among dysfunctional family members of a Texas oil dynasty: its alcoholic heir, his wife (a former secretary for the family company), his childhood best friend, and his ruthless, self-destructive sister. The screenplay by George Zuckerman was based on Robert Wilder's 1946 novel of the same title, a thinly disguised account (or roman à clef) of the real-life scandal involving torch singer Libby Holman and her husband, tobacco heir Zachary Smith Reynolds, who was killed under mysterious circumstances at his family estate in 1932. A film version of the novel was optioned by RKO Pictures and International Pictures in 1946, but the project was shelved because of threats from the Reynolds family. Universal Pictures acquired the rights to the novel after absorbing International Pictures, and began developing the film in 1955. Zuckerman made numerous alterations in his screenplay to avoid lawsuits from the Reynolds family, among them shifting the setting from North Carolina to Texas, and having the family fortune originate in oil rather than tobacco. Filmed in Los Angeles in late 1955 and early 1956, Written on the Wind was released theatrically in England in the fall of 1956…

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Images