Another American-family melodrama: Douglas Sirk effectively gives voice to the Munch-like cry implicit in Rebel Without a Cause in this most outspoken and visually baroque work. Written on the Wind would be a classical-camp precurser to "Dallas" were it not for the Sirkian method of rendering the alienating strangely moving, and vice versa. With garish jukebox colors and unabashed psychosexual symbolism, Sirk details the last days of the Hadley oil dynasty as it declines into sterility and death. Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall are ostensibly the stars, playing two upstanding outsiders who become catalysts for the Hadley madness. But it was Dorothy Malone and Robert Stack who took the kudos for their portrayal of the Hadley siblings, Marylee and Kyle, two people twisted beyond all normality from reaching for forbidden loves; they writhe through their world of wealth like figures from a German Expressionist poster come to life. She embodies the fifties shorthand for female starvation, nymphomania, while he is the alcoholic, impotent playboy, an Absurdist's hero in a bright yellow sportscar. R. W. Fassbinder wrote, "For Douglas Sirk, madness is a kind of hope, I think."