Written on the Wind was a box office success, a prime example of how Hollywood could combat the threat of television with big-budget, wide-screen, lushly color-photographed dramas with adult themes (i.e., lots of sex). Written on the Wind was able to push the limits of what could be shown on the screen partly because the Motion Picture Production Code was slightly modified around the time of the film's release with a more relaxed attitude towards its most stringent rules.

Dorothy Malone received a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her heated performance as Marylee. Robert Stack received a Best Supporting Actor nomination and was highly favored to win, but was upset by Anthony Quinn as Paul Gauguin in Lust for Life (1956). Victor Young and Sammy Cahn were also nominated for the title song.

In 2005, Lauren Bacall accepted the Frontier Award on behalf of the film from the Austin Film Society, which annually makes inductions into the Texas Film Hall of Fame recognizing actors, directors, screenwriters, filmmakers and films from, influenced by or inspired by the Lone Star State.

"It is in visual terms that Written on the Wind merits our attention. É We watch Stack in the half-shadow of a blue bedroom, watch him dash into a red corridor and jump into a yellow taxi which lets him out in front of a steel-gray. airplane. All these hues are vivid and frank, varnished and lacquered to such a degree that a painter would scream. But they are the colors of the luxury civilization, the industrial colors that remind us that we live in the age of plastics."- Francois Truffaut, 1957.

"What the movie has is power and guts. I think it is my most gutty picture, which naturally is due to some extent to the material." - Douglas Sirk, Sirk on Sirk by Jon Halliday (Viking, 1972).

"The most violent and hyperbolic of family melodramas, Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind may be the most quintessential American movie of the 1950s. The film turns a cold eye on the antics of the degenerate superrich...Trash on an epic scale, it's a vision as luridly color-photographed, relentlessly high-octane and flamboyantly petit bourgeois as a two-toned T-bird with ultrachrome trim"- J. Hoberman, The A List, Da Capo Press.

"To appreciate a film like Written on the Wind probably takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman's masterpieces, because Bergman's themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message. His interiors are wildly over the top, and his exteriors are phony- he wants you to notice the artifice, to see that he's not using realism but an exaggerated Hollywood studio style."- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, January 18, 1998.

"Written on the Wind is bigger than All That Heaven Allows [1955]. The plot is fuller, the characters traverse greater expanses, and the themes of love and money are more at home in a mighty saga. Private jets, rivers of booze, barroom fisticuffs, shiny clothes, and a forest of phallic oil derricks give Written on the Wind the look of a rich fat uncle to Dynasty and Dallas. - Matthew Kennedy, Bright Lights Film Journal (www.brightlightsfilm.com).

"The director, Douglas Sirk, shows his talent for whipping up sour, stylized soap operas in posh settings." - Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (Henry Holt & Co.).

"The sheerest Hollywood moonshine: high-flying melodramatic hokum which moves fast enough to be very entertaining." - Halliwell's Film & Video Guide (HarperPerennial).

"This film provides Sirk's clear commentary and critique of the underlying hollowness and shallowness of American society in the placid 1950s, and misfit lives stunted and corrupted by mental anguish, alcoholism, sexual frustration, and corruptible materialistic wealth." - The Greatest Films (www.filmsite.org/writt.html).

"The artificial lighting and crazy color schemes for which Sirk was noted are here, but there's again (as in All That Heaven Allows) an emotional intensity, carried to operatic extremes, that works against the idea that the film is merely a florid exercise in camp." - Gary Morris, Images Journal (www.imagesjournal.com/issue10/reviews/sirk/text.htm).

"This ranks with The Tarnished Angels [1958] as Sirk's best work. This is also about tarnished characters...As in all good potboilers, the characters are driven by their passions and are surrounded by destructive forces..." - Danny Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic (Fireside).

"This outspoken drama probes rather startlingly into the morals and passions of an uppercrust Texas oil family. Intelligent use of the flashback technique before and during the titles credits runoff builds immediate interest and expectancy without diminishing plot punch." - Variety Movie Guide (Prentiss Hall).

"Irresistible kitsch" - Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide (Plume).

Compiled by Rob Nixon & Jeff Stafford