Written on the Wind is a 1956 American Southern Gothic melodrama film directed by Douglas Sirk and starring Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, and Dorothy Malone. It follows the dysfunctional family members of a Texas oil dynasty, including the complicated relationships among its alcoholic heir: his wife, a former secretary for the family company, his childhood best friend, and his ruthless, self-destructive sister.
Theatrical release poster by Reynold Brown
Dorothy Malone won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the film.
Image: Smithreynolds 1931
Image: Libby Holman 1930 cropped
Southern Gothic is an artistic subgenre of fiction, country music, film, theatre, and television that are heavily influenced by Gothic elements and the American South. Common themes of Southern Gothic include storytelling of deeply flawed, disturbing, or eccentric characters who may be involved in hoodoo, decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and other sinister events relating to or stemming from poverty, alienation, crime, or violence.
Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).
Seward Plantation House, Independence, a strictly fantastical one.
Eudora Welty was labeled a Southern Gothic author, though she disliked the label
Cherie Priest has been identified as a modern Southern Gothic writer