Wild Is the Wind

Wild Is the Wind (1957)

A Masterpiece of Emotional Reality!

A widowed Nevada rancher goes to Italy and marries the sister of his deceased wife and brings her back to the ranch, but his haunting memories of his lost love and her tendency to drift away to other men cause the two to have a tough time at keeping a marriage together.

Date of release
1957-12-11
TMDB
6.8 / 10 (14)
Runtime
1h 54m
Genres
Drama
Director
George Cukor

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 2

Wild is the Wind is a 1957 American drama film directed by George Cukor and starring Anna Magnani, Anthony Quinn, and Anthony Franciosa. It tells the story of an American rancher who, after his wife dies, goes to Italy to marry her sister, but finds that she falls in love with his young ranch hand.

Production

Anna Magnani had made a successful film for Hal Wallis, The Rose Tattoo (1955). He wanted to make a follow up and she said she would only do a remake of the Italian film, Furia (1947). According to Arnold Schulman this was because Magnani "was in love with Rossellini at one time and wanted to be in this particular movie which he was planning to do.

Wallis obtained the rights to Furia and the contract specified the original writer of that movie would get credit on any remake. Wallis arranged for various writers to take a pass at the material. Philip Yordan wrote a screenplay and Dalton Trumbo rewrote this script. These scripts were not used in the final film.

Arnold Schulman felt the original was "a dumb story, basically the same story the musical The Most Happy Fella is taken from: the mail-order wife." He pitched an idea for a take on the movie which appealed to Wallis who signed him to turn it into a screenplay, then called Obsession. It would be Schulman's first produced feature screenplay.

Schulman originally worked on the script with director John Sturges. As writing progressed, there were concerns about Sturges' suitabilty for the project and he left, replaced by George Cukor. Schulman said "Sturges considered himself an action director, and at the point that it was clear the project was turning into a love story with real people, he either quit or moved on.

Schulman said the experience of developing the script with Wallis and Cukor was very enjoyable. He considered the screenplay a complete original nothing like the Italian film. However Paramount insisted that the original Italian author be credited on the final to protect the studio legally.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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