Douglas Sirk, perhaps more than any Hollywood director, had a window on "the aesthetics of plenty." (As in All That Heaven Allows, it was a picture-window from which one looked out.) Written on the Wind would be a classical-camp precursor 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. Next to Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall, upstanding outsiders, Dorothy Malone and Robert Stack portray the Hadley siblings as people literally twisted all out of shape from reaching for forbidden loves. They writhe through their world of wealth like figures from a German Expressionist poster come to life. She is the fifties icon of female starvation, the nymphomaniac; he is the impotent playboy, an Absurdist's hero in a bright colored convertible.