Written on the Wind (1956) on Netflix
Mitch Wayne is a geologist for the Hadley oil family in Texas. His best friend Kyle, the alcoholic heir, marries Lucy Moore, a New York secretary, while Kyle's sister Marylee pursues Mitch.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.3/1015,326 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes88%
Trailer
Plot summary
Jasper Hadley built an oil fortune in Texas, and his two children have not taken after him. Kyle, his son, drinks heavily and wants an approval his father gives instead to Mitch Wayne, who grew up alongside Kyle and now works as a geologist for the family company. Kyle's sister Marylee is in love with Mitch, who thinks of her as a sister, and she answers his refusals with brief affairs around town. On a business trip to New York City, the two men meet Lucy Moore, a secretary in the company's Manhattan office. Lucy first shows interest in Mitch, but Kyle courts her, invites her aboard his private plane and asks her to marry him. She accepts and returns with him to Texas.
Cast
- Joseph Granbyas R.J. Courtney
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Written on the Wind (1956)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film's source novel by Robert Wilder was inspired by the real death of Zachary Smith Reynolds, son of R. J. Reynolds and heir to the tobacco fortune, who was shot in the head at his estate after a birthday party; his wife, torch singer Libby Holman, and friend Albert Walker fell under suspicion but were never charged.
- To avoid a lawsuit from the Reynolds family, George Zuckerman's screenplay moved the story from North Carolina to Texas, changed the Hadley fortune from tobacco to oil, and eliminated several characters or changed their ages.
- The novel was optioned by RKO Pictures in 1945 and passed to International Pictures before Universal bought it in 1946; the project stayed in limbo because the Reynolds family threatened to sue any film version.
- Robert Stack believed he lost the Best Supporting Actor Oscar to Anthony Quinn, whose Lust for Life performance ran no more than 25 minutes, because 20th Century Fox organized block voting so its loaned-out contract player could not win for another studio.
- Lauren Bacall's film career was floundering in the mid-1950s when she accepted the relatively unflashy role of Lucy Moore at the behest of her husband, Humphrey Bogart.
- The film's Manhattan 21 Club sequence was rebuilt on the Universal lot from photographs and dressed with real items from the restaurant, such as napkins lent by the club owners.
- Dorothy Malone, then known for B movies and a small part in The Big Sleep, dyed her hair platinum blonde to shed her "nice girl" image as the obsessive Marylee Hadley, and her Oscar-winning performance finally gave her cachet in the film industry.
- The staircase set used as the Hadleys' home had earlier been used in Universal's 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera and in the 1936 film My Man Godfrey.
