Tune In Tuesday: Written On The Wind Criterion Blu-Ray

Alright, so *Written on the Wind* (1956), Douglas Sirk's fever-dream of doomed desire and oil-money rot, just got the Criterion Blu-ray treatment. You pop it in, the logo flickers, and suddenly you're drowning in Technicolor—a world where Rock Hudson broods, Lauren Bacall smolders, and Robert Stack self-destructs in a whiskey-warped cyclone of daddy issues and fast cars. Dorothy Malone? A hurricane in human form, swirling between lust and self-loathing in a way that makes you feel like you walked into a pulp novel mid-explosion.  

The transfer? Sharp enough to cut glass, saturated to the point where you can practically smell the cigarette smoke curling off a $500 silk shirt. The special features? Scholars waxing poetic about melodrama as high art, archival interviews where everyone sounds too classy to admit just how much fun they had making trash look divine.  

You watch it in a haze, thinking: This is *Dynasty* before *Dynasty*, this is Fassbinder’s bible, this is what happens when postwar America overdoses on its own success. And then, just when you think you’ve got it pegged, that wind blows, the credits roll, and you realize: You don’t watch *Written on the Wind*—it watches you.