Aside from a raised eyebrow at Mitch’s (the eyebrow-raising Rock Hudson) involvement with the Hadleys, a dysfunctional Texas oil clan, there’s nothing explicitly queer about Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind. However, the first few minutes of this glossy 1956 melodrama reveal how its Technicolored tendrils spun out to touch future queer film artists like Todd Haynes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and John Waters. Before the credits roll, the alcoholic Kyle (an Oscar-nominated Robert Stack) nearly crashes his hot rod into the family mansion, while his hot-to-trot sister, Marylee (an Oscar-winning Dorothy Malone), and his bedridden lovelorn wife, Lucy (a luminous Lauren Bacall), rest in their gilded Hadley cage. What follows is one-part hothouse Tennessee Williams, one-part Brechtian indictment of (mostly straight) American values. As Roger Ebert once wrote, it’s a film for which full appreciation “probably takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman’s masterpieces.” This film will be introduced by Joshua Ray, film critic for Cinema St. Louis’s The Lens and programmer for QFest St. Louis. —Joshua Ray