Dissolute Texas oilman Kyle Hadley (Stack) woos lovely secretary Lucy Moore (Bacall) away from his best friend Mitch (Hudson), but harbors doubts after they marry that the child she's carrying is really his. Motivated by jealousy, Kyle's nymphomaniac sibling Marylee (Malone) inflames his fears, setting the stage for a violent confrontation with ruinous consequences.

Douglas Sirk's stirring melodrama about the meltdown of an oil-baron family is a high-strung potboiler mixing rage, impotence, money, sex, anxiety, and murder in one flaming concoction. Visually sumptuous and redolent with garish colors to match the Hadleys' bursting emotions, "Wind" boasts the fantastic talents of Hudson and Bacall as straight-arrow types in a hellish situation. The chiseled Stack is a mess of masculine anguish as hard-drinking Kyle, and Robert Keith is excellent as the Hadley patriarch. Still, it's Oscar winner Dorothy Malone who takes the prize for her outlandishly catty turn as Marylee. "Wind" may not be subtle, but it is a whirlwind of (melo)dramatic delights.