The film Bitter Rain Loves the Spring Wind / Written on the Wind (1956) poster for a 2016 restoration re-release in France
Family melodramas have always been the unpopular in European and American films, and they rarely go out of their way to describe the relationships and emotions of family members like Asian filmmakers. But Douglas Sirk (1897-1987) was undoubtedly a master of American family melodrama, and quite possibly the only one. His masterpiece Written on the Wind (1956) is the perfect aristocratic ruling class family melodrama, and in a way it is a bizarre detective story that makes the audience a detective and makes the corrupt ruling class of The United States a villain.
"Bitter Rain and Spring Wind" belongs to the typical family popular drama (also known as women's film, tear-jerking drama), which is a narrative form that integrates music and drama, and is often handled by classic popular dramas in the face of the state of spiritual and emotional crisis. The growth and identity of men is often handled by genres such as Westerns and war films, while the development of women is often discussed in popular dramas. It explores the subtle emotions, pains, and disillusionment familiar to women, women and female themes, which are only central to family dramas.
Lauren Bacall (left) Rock Hudson (center) Dorothy Malone (right) walked together toward the set of the film Bitter Rain in Love/ Written on the Wind (1956).
Douglas Seck and Vincent Minnelli (1903–1986) and Nicholas Rey Nicholas Ray (1911–1979) were the masters of the 1950s family drama, but they each had a different look: Douglas Seck was known for his style, Vincent Minnelly was good at portraying characters, and Nicholas Ray was good at expressing the alienation and oppression between families. "Bitter Rain and Spring Wind" is a classic work of Douglas Seck, and the film is full of bold and abrupt Seck style, so that the audience not only sees the plot, but also is full of visual spectacle. People's emotions are described visually, making a mythical structure. Douglas Seck's style stands before your eyes, rather than blending in. In this case, the audience can be withdrawn from the film, and the effect of washing and thinking is produced. Douglas Seck put the sensibility of modernism in pop culture.
Stills from the film Bitter Rain Loves the Spring Wind / Written on the Wind (1956).
Director Douglas Seck's assessment that "Bitter Rain loves the Spring Breeze" is "a film about failure" is only used by him to neutralize the "hidden sexual desires" that are excessively filled with his films and will be identified as his personal film style. Failure and frustration are what causes the film's protagonist, Kyle Hadley (Robert Stark Robert Stack), to anesthetize his sexual fears with alcohol, and his sister Marie (Dorothy Malone) to fall oblivious to the casual Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson, 1925–1985); Kyle's fear of sexual impotence evolves into a relationship with Lucy Moore (Lauren Hudson). Played by Lauren Bacall, 1924-2014) was married to fear of infertility and refused to have children.
The film Bitter Rain Loves the Spring Wind / Written on the Wind (1956) American DVD cover
The film alludes to these "failures and setbacks" with a large number of explicit Freudian and superficial light effects, colors, and scenes. Douglas Seck places Robert Stark and Dorothy Malone at the center of the film's emotional vortex. Their highly stylized performances, their contrived way of stating those quirky and somewhat lengthy lines, earned them a college nomination for a lifestyle film — and for themselves (Dorothy Malone won the 29th Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as a wayward sister).
The film draws on the most complex character configurations in Douglas Seck's films, which he calls the character's "unhappy loop": Mary loves Mickey, Mickey loves Lucy, Lucy loves Kyle, Kyle loves no one, not even himself. The complexity of the plot opens up sexual themes: Marie's promiscuity, which is how she uses to punish Mickey; Kyle's supposed infertility; Kyle's suspicions of Mickey and Lucy when Lucy is pregnant; and so on.
Lauren Bacall (left) and Robert Stark Robert Stack amuse each other while waiting for instructions on the set of the filmIng The Bitter Rain Loves the Spring/Written on the Wind (1956).
In this group, Mickey, played by Locke Hudson, is a static character, and he is complemented by the stubborn, stoic Lucy played by Lauren Bacall. By contrast, both Kyle and Marie are tormented by insecurities, incompetence, and overindulgence, and Seck denounces them as "the secret masters of the film." In melodrama, single-dimensional characters like Mickey and Lucy serve as a foil for those who are "split", multidimensional, who provide most of the physical action and emotional input. Thus Became "a social critique of the rich and spoiled, about the American family, violence, and emotional values." ”
Stills from the film Bitter Rain/ Written on the Wind (1956), Lauren Bacall (left), Rock Hudson (center) and Robert Stark Robert Stack (right)
The history of American cinema gave a relatively high evaluation to this 1956 "Bitter Rain and Spring Wind". In today's view, this movie is indeed very different from the general love popular drama. In fact, this film is not telling a love story in the usual sense, it does not focus on the important issues in the popular drama of love, that is, the ultimate ownership of love and the ultimate fate of the characters. What its characters lack and desire is not the object of love from the beginning but the ability to love. It does everything in its power to portray the personalities and inner struggles of the four characters with romantic relationships, or in the words of Lucy in the play, "the exploration of the soul."
The four characters in the film, Kyle, Lucy, Marie, and Mickey, have a symbolic personality meaning that is no less than the connotation of a serious movie, and the relationship between the characters is based on a closed system of character symbols, on the basis of which had hadley manor, Kyle's father, the oil tower, the wind, the sea, the pistol, the mirror, the courtroom, the exaggerated color, and so on are involved, intertwined into a unique narrative map and symbolic system.
Promotional photo for the film Bitter Rain/ Written on the Wind (1956), Rock Hudson (left) Lauren Bacall (right)
So beneath the sea level of this love story, the subconscious deep sea of a family or even an era (in fact, more accurately, the creator) has sprung up. Douglas Seck's exploration in "Bitter Rain and Spring Wind" has gone far beyond the content of a popular drama. This is one of the reasons why his films are regarded as successful examples of popular dramas, and at the same time they are revered by the French Manual school as author films (another major reason is his neat and stylized directing skills).
The character of Lucy is somewhat free from the clichés of female figures in Hollywood movies. Lucy's superficial trait is elegant and independent, which is synonymous with rational order, but her heart is eager to challenge and face the unknown. This internal and external contradiction manifests itself in her liking for the fresh advertising industry but insecure; she longs to make a home, but falls in love with a Kyle with a gun in the air. Therefore, the most critical scenes of Lucy's character are one of the conversations with Kyle in the high-altitude cabin, one is the silent sea behind the pistol under Kyle's pillow on the wedding night, and the other is the scene before and after the abortion in the bedroom on the night of the shooting.
Poster for the American version of the film Bitter Rain in Love with the Wind/ Written on the Wind (1956).
The sky, the sea, and fertility all have surreal meanings, Lucy is eager to understand and control the mystery, she tries to face and release each other and herself in the name of "soul exploration", but in the name of courage and love to save the materially expanded, spiritually deficient souls, in the director's view, it is both noble and doomed to tragedy. But in any case, Lucy's entry caused a shock to the originally shaken structure of family relations. Kyle tries to regain male confidence, but is defeated by a fantasy of defeat. Marily lost everything. Mickey's relationship with the family also eventually broke with the loss of Lucy's baby.
What is worth savoring is the testimony of Marily in court at the end. Unlike Kyle, she ultimately chose to tell the truth and bear the consequences to give freedom to her loved ones. Her awakening is a resurgence of Kyle's death from another perspective, so it makes sense for Mitch to look into Marie's eyes in court, consciously exuding hope and comforting love.
The film Bitter Rain loves the Spring Wind/ Written on the Wind (1956) features Robert Stark Stack (left) and Lauren Bacall (right) in the studio
In the closing scene, Marie sits under the portrait of her father with an oil tower. The illusion has been shattered, and the other half who once thought it was happiness is driving away with another woman, and in the face of the oil tower (prop) that keeps her away from the happy riverside life, although she understands that it is not where happiness lies, she has nothing but to cling to it. Is it to leave for love, or to stay and endure the pain of waking? Mickey who drove out of HADLEY and Mary Lee who stayed in HADLEY are the problems left by the play to the audience, and the "illusory happy ending" opens up a vast space for imagination.
In the 1950s, the United States implemented a strict electrical inspection system, and was limited by the norms of social morality, so there were many problems that could not be discussed on the table, such as black and white racial issues, class issues, and the corruption of the human heart by matter, douglas Seck transformed these taboos into emotional things; placed human characteristics in symbolic means (or abstract and deified); after this compression, it became a characteristic of the personality of a certain character.
If you look at it from another angle, Freud's doctrine was widely popular in Europe and the United States in the 1950s, and his symbolism also appeared in large quantities in the film; the potential repression was converted into symbols as an alternative. Therefore, Douglas Seck, in "Bitter Rain and Spring Wind", delicately uses different colors to express different situations; at the same time, he also uses the reflection of the mirror to convey the meaning; of course, it is indispensable to explain "sex".
Formalists believe that the external environment is the reaction of the inner psychology. So Douglas Seck assigns the color system to the following in the film: red represents love, passion, desire, violence, danger; so the room of sister Mary is red, she lights a cigarette in the fire, she is like a rich fire crane, a wild dance, full of desire; and finally she also plays with fire. The heroine Lucy is also related to red, such as the large number of roses, and the bed is also red, which is a metaphor for the later transformation of love into violence.
The film Bitter Rain Loves the Spring Wind / Written on the Wind (1956) American Blu-ray Edition Cover
Another detail that is quite playful is that the male protagonist Mickey reveals a small section of red socks in the bar, which seems to convey a hidden love. The other male protagonist, Kyle, is connected to white, which is related to illness and death, symbolizing his physical weakness, weak willpower, and powerlessness to "sex". All of this caused him a high degree of frustration and anxiety, and finally he was on his way to death. As for the large pillars of the hall that symbolize the family, they are also white, which may represent the decline of a family. As for his father's color, it was earthy, and even the room was filled with solid wood and wooden bookshelves, as well as an iron tower of oil wells towering above the earth. Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982) once said: How wonderful is the structure and color of Douglas Seck's picture!
Rock Hudson (left) and Lauren Bacall (right) talk on the set of the film Bitter Rain/ Written on the Wind (1956).
There is a party in the film, which is filled with matter, creating a suffocating sense of closure, which is also Douglas Seck's condemnation of material (or wealth). This hysterical sense of closure makes everyone lacking. The father lacks the care of the family, the brother lacks the ability and confidence, and the younger sister lacks love. They have in vain the wealth they earn from oil, but the family feels lonely; they have everything, but they have an unfillable deficit, and it is full of helpless fate.
Douglas Seck's talent is expressed in the way he speaks stories, his style of dealing with material, and his approach to storytelling. Douglas Seck's most important style was his photography and lighting, both of which were controlled by photographer Russell Metty. Douglas Seck once said, "We see things the same way. Douglas Seck uses an unnatural approach to lighting, which is meant to remind the audience that cinema is not reality, it is just cinema. He expressed the concept of "alienation" from the German realist theater through a stylized approach, and thus recreated reality to conform to the views of filmmakers.
Poster for the movie Bitter Rain Loves the Spring Wind / Written on the Wind (1956).