'Written On The Wind'

A really, really dark film considering it was released in 1956 and had a pretty good cast of actors and actresses. This was edgy (or had to be) for the time and the place.

It involves sex, alcohol, domestic violence and a miscarriage. Not a date night film by any means.

It co-starred the extremely good-looking Lauren Bacall as "Lucy," a role she was pushed into by her husband, Humphrey Bogart, who was then sick with cancer and would die the year after the film was released. Bacall's career was already floundering even though she still had killer good looks and was only 32. She'd gotten a bad reputation after turning down a number of scripts. She'd do only three other films for the next eight years.

Written on the Wind was also a keynote performance for Dorothy Malone, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Marylee, the crazy nympho sister. For the film, she dyed her hair platinum blonde and remade herself as sort of a "good girl gone bad."

The director was Douglas Sirk, a Dane born in Hamburg, Germany. He studied film all through the 1920s and 1930s until leaving Nazi Germany in 1937 for political and personal reasons: His wife was Jewish. After a salty career of hits, he abruptly packed his bags in 1959, at the age of 62 or so, and went back to Germany and never directed another motion picture.