Few films define their genre with the same aesthetic authority and subversive power as Written on the Wind. This is the pinnacle of mid-1950s melodrama, the moment when Douglas Sirk, a German exile transplanted to Hollywood, took the tools Universal-International made available to him—saturated Technicolor, the highest-paid stars, soap opera plots—and used them like a scalpel to dissect the corpse of the American Dream. The film is a visual assault, an orgy of primary colors so aggressive as to be toxic. Red is not red, it is the color of repressed desire and spilled blood; the yellow of Kyle's Corvette at the beginning of the film is not sunny, it is the color of disease. Sirk paints a world of lacquered, shiny, and perfect surfaces, only to show us the rot they hide, a world where everything, as the title suggests, is already dead and blown away.

The story, adapted from a pulp novel by Robert Wilder, is the chronicle of a Texan oil dynasty, the Hadleys, who have everything that postwar American capitalism has to offer: untold wealth, absolute power, and terminal psychological dysfunction. Patriarch Hadley built an empire, but he spawned two monsters. It is material that borders on Grand Guignol, and Sirk treats it with the seriousness of a Greek tragedy, or perhaps, more accurately, like a Tennessee Williams drama stripped of all poetry and loaded with Freudian neuroses. At the center of this vortex are the two heirs: Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) and Marylee Hadley (Dorothy Malone). They are alcoholism and nymphomania, impotence and hysteria, two sides of the same coin of self-pity and privilege. They have spent their lives in the shadow of the family's best friend, the competent and virile Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), and this has poisoned their entire existence.

Robert Stack's Oscar-nominated performance is a bundle of exposed nerves. His Kyle is a pathetic man-child, defined entirely by his inadequacy and his terror of impotence, both sexual and professional. He clings to the bottle as a surrogate for the masculinity he lacks. But the film really belongs to Dorothy Malone, who won a well-deserved Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Her Marylee is a destructive force of nature. She is pure unleashed Id, a woman consumed by a desire she cannot satisfy (for Mitch) and who therefore decides to burn the whole world around her. Her famous mambo sequence, performed while her father is having a heart attack, is a pivotal moment in American cinema: it is not a dance, it is an act of nihilistic rebellion, a pagan ritual of sexual frustration performed in the temple of capitalism (the Hadley mansion). Sirk frames her in rooms full of mirrors, doubling her image and her despair.

In this menagerie of neurotics, Sirk introduces two “healthy” characters, outsiders who serve as a moral yardstick. Rock Hudson (Mitch) and Lauren Bacall (the female lead, Lucy Moore, whom Kyle hastily marries) are the agents of normality. They come from the world of work, rationality, and competence. Sirk and his cinematographer Russell Metty film them differently: their colors are cooler (blue, beige, gray), their acting more controlled. They are the dam that should contain the Hadleys' madness. But in Sirk's cinema, normality is pale, almost boring. The real spectacle is decadence. Lauren Bacall, in particular, with her 1940s noir aura, seems almost out of place in this garish Technicolor, a remnant of a more cynical but perhaps less sick era. The film, after all, is an analysis of the class struggle between those who inherit money (and are destroyed by it) and those who have to earn it (and understand its value).

Douglas Sirk's genius lies in his visual language, in his critical mise-en-scène. All That Heaven Allows is the perfect example of how the director uses space and objects to comment on his characters. The Hadley mansion, a triumph of 1950s modernism, is a prison of glass and marble. The characters are constantly filmed through door frames, reflected in mirrors, separated by luxurious furniture. They are trapped in their own material well-being. Objects become almost brazen symbols: the phallic oil wells pumping incessantly outside Kyle's bedroom window, reminding him of his failed virility; the toy airplane that Kyle clutches, symbolizing his unresolved childhood; and above all, the villa's monumental staircase, which is not an architectural element but a dramatic arena, the site of downfall, confrontation, and death.

The film's climax is an explosion of violence, trials, and confessions, as the genre demands. Yet the ending does not lead to true catharsis. Sure, the good guys (Mitch and Lucy) leave together, free to live a normal life. But the final shot, the one that sticks in the mind, is an icon of damnation. Marylee, now the sole mistress of the Hadley empire, sits at her father's desk, dressed in mourning, desperately clutching the golden model of the oil well. She has gained everything and lost everything. It is the perfect portrait of the emptiness of wealth, a final image of almost pictorial intensity. Written on the Wind is a masterpiece not despite its genre, but because of it. It is a film that, beneath the surface of a trite story, conceals one of the most acute and visually intelligent critiques ever made of American society.