Four main characters make up the film, ii are the dysfunctional children of oil millionaire Jasper Hadley (Robert Keith), and the other two come from the lower echelons of society. Jasper's son Kyle (Robert Stack) and daughter Marylee (Dorothy Malone, who received an honorary society Award for her per salmagundiance) are rich, spoiled, hollow and self-absorbed. Kyle is an alcoholic, college dropout playboy, and Marylee
Although there has always been working women and independent, sexually emancipated women, the liberated woman was not considered the proper role for a mid-fifties woman. Many women worked, for example, during World War II but in the postwar period, there was a move to get women tail into their place in the home. The Madonna/whore, good girl/ hard girl conception of women was prominent in the 1950s. In Written on the Wind, Marylee and Lucy represent the two stereotypes. But since Sirk is also parodying the period, he shows the hypocrisy of this gender typing as well as the obvious. Lucy epitomizes the proper, middle-class 1950s women. When they first meet, she tells Kyle, "I'll probably walk down pat(p) an aisle and wind up in a suburb with a husband, a mortgage, and children.
" Her middle-class values and ideology "assumes a more positive value, representing the 'right' alternative for the corrupt self-destructive Hadleys" (Schatz 255). In contrast to Marylee, Lucy is not an easy one-night stand. She compromises her virtue only when Kyle "pays" her with a marriage license, which may be seen as a form of prostitution. As Schatz points out, "regardless of the purity of Lucy's motives?she sells herself in marriage to Kyle as a material possession, a sexual commodity" (255).
Retrieved 10-31-03< www.suntimes.com/ebert/
And the studio System. New York: Random House,
Written on the Wind is intemperately in the genre of 1950s high-flown melodramas, and was most belike seen that way by 1950s audiences. Ebert claims, "to appreciate the trashiness of 'Written on the Wind' is not to condescend to it. To a greater degree than we realize, our lives and decisions are formed by pop clichTs and conventions" (Written on the Wind). In new years, however, the film has been firmly placed in the category of postmodern irony and parody. Sirk was able to "critique American social conventions and the capitalist drive while still appearing to play within the rules of the conventional Hollywood stu
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