With garish, jukebox colors and gutsy, sexual-psychological symbolism, Sirk delineates the last days of the Hadley oil dynasty as it declines into sterility and death. Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall are the ostensible stars as two upstanding outsiders who become catalysts for the Hadley madness. But it was Dorothy Malone and Robert Stack who took the kudos for their performances as the Hadley siblings, Marylee and Kyle, who have become twisted out of all normality from reaching for an impossible love. They writhe through their empty world of wealth, looking like figures out of German Expressionism; but she embodies the fifties shorthand for female starvation-nymphomania-while he is an Absurdist's tragic hero in a bright yellow sportscar.