Magnificent Obsession (1954, Douglas Sirk)
The property was not only an old one—Universal had released a version of Magnificent Obsession with the same title, directed by John M. Stahl, in 1935—but originally took the form of a 1919 novel by an eccentric pastor, this going some distance toward explaining the tale’s peculiar chain letter spiritualism and “pay it forward” gospel of good works.
Playboy Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson) nearly dies in a reckless speedboat accident but is saved by a resuscitator belonging to the widely-beloved Dr. Phillips, who could have used the resuscitator himself, and sadly dies. Having descended into moral tailspin, Merrick meets the painter Randolph, a former acolyte of the deceased Dr. Phillips, and, in his clumsy ardour, eager to perform a solid about-face, shortly thereafter proceeds to harry the poor widow of Dr. Phillips (Jane Wyman) to such an extent that she is struck by an automobile and perhaps permanently blinded. And that’s just the set-up. Director Douglas Sirk himself called it “a damned crazy story if ever there was one.” All well and good. As critic/essayist Geoffrey O’Brien has observed (perhaps putting it a little strongly): Sirk is less into “toning down the story’s emotional extremes” than he is allowing for “their full and somewhat demented force to emerge.”
Though the great temporarily expatriated German director Douglas Sirk was already fifty-six years of age when he made Magnificent Obsession, it would prove to be the first of four 1950s domestic melodramas from the director (followed by All That Heaven Allows (1954), Written on the Wind (1956), and Imitation of Life (1959)) that any person of sense would have to consider among the legacy triumphs of three-strip movie colour.
A large part of why the situation at Universal would prove copacetic for Sirk has to do with his regular producer there, Ross Hunter, a man known to fuss over stagecraft and wardrobe though hardly a jot over stories and scripts. The popular weepies Sirk made with Hunter were not regarded highly by contemporary critics, a matter only compounded by almost all having indeed been major commercial successes. It was largely second wave feminists who caught on, many first having seen these films on television, recognizing in the old weepies a sober delineation of the hurdles to personal emancipation handicapping the lives of (most especially) women. The artifice and glory in surfaces is always in Magnificent Obsession an affect at the level of those surfaces corresponding to ominous rumblings beneath.
In Hollywood, the learned and erudite Sirk was every bit the aristocratic outlier, an artist who describes the filmed face of Zarah Leander, the Swedish actress he worked with at Germany’s UFA in the thirties, as speaking continually and calmly in a minor key, or who addresses thoughtfully means to neutralize the unreality of the stage in his work with the actors while enhancing other artificial elements. He even made it clear that popular melodramas in the American idiom focused on the middle class appealed to him because it was in the middle class that he had watched Hitler’s dictatorship take root.
In her memoir I’ll Cry Tomorrow, published in 1954, the same year Magnificent Obsession was released, the actress and singer Lillian Roth, popular in the twenties and early thirties, her life having thereafter descended into alcoholism and abuse, recounts having appeared on the popular television program This is Your Life the year previous; a woman in recovery repeatedly dragged through the mud by the tabloid press, jettisoned unfeelingly by her peers, and habitually used and abused by men inside and outside her industry, providing an emotional safety valve for the nation. Magnificent Obsession knows and is betting on it: there must be any number of people alone at any given time, in any given supposed tribalistic paradise, who are saturated with melancholy and in need of a good restorative cry. Its Technicolor splendour asserts itself as everywhere the shackles of the society’s integrative hallucination, but what Sirk understands works on the back lots of Universal just as well as it worked on the stages of Vienna is less the amplification or distortion of emotion than it is emotion’s being tuned precisely and methodically plucked, even as the fantasy enfolds the audience, having drawn us so close, the light and colour and tears having all but blinded us.
-Written by Jason Wierzba