Review of Magnificent Obsession (1935) by Eric F — 29 May 2009

Share the plot of Douglas Sirk's "Magnificent Obsession" to a loved one and they'll ask what soap opera you're referencing. The plot is an absurd folly that'll ask you to suspend more disbelief than any "Star Wars" flick. It contains simultaneous life-threatening injuries on either side of a lake and an instantaneous blinding after a car accident. I won't spoil the cure for said blindness for you - well, I guess you could see it coming. Love! Love is the cure! Who would have thought?

Surprisingly, however, "Magnificent Obsession" just works. Much like Sirk's other 50's melodramas, like "Written on the Wind" or "All That Heaven Allows", the film has such a sweet tenderness that just draws you in. The best example of a modern Douglas Sirk is Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. Like Sirk, Almodovar has an almost magical control over his films and has the ability to turn the most preposterous and convoluted stories into completely satisfying pictures. They're self-aware soap operas that marvelously weave together these absurd romances in a series of genre cliches.

Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson) is a self-absorbed millionaire playboy. One afternoon, he recklessly drives around a lake on his speedboat going almost 200 miles per hour. He crashes so terribly that he needs immediate medical care, and he is then saved by a medical device owned by a doctor living on the other side of the lake. Meanwhile, however, said doctor has a heart attack and cannot be saved in time. At the hospital, where Merrick is recuperating, we discover that the doctor's widow, Helen Phillips (Jane Wyman), is Merrick's nurse.

When Merrick learns of the man who died because of his own recklessness, he feels the need to make it up to Helen. He ends up falling in love with her. Helen, however, resists and cannot bare to see him. Luckily for Merrick, a car strikes Helen and she's blinded. Success! He now pursuits her on the beach under a fake identity, despite Helen's knowing friends telling him to back off.

There's much to love about the movie. The relentlessly charming performances of both Hudson and Wyman, who also starred in Sirk's "All That Heaven Allows", a film way ahead of it's time. The bloated metaphor of blindness in both a literal and figurative sense. The beautiful techicolor photography. "Magnificent Obsession" sounds like, in every way, a dumb chick flick with Matthew McConaughey - but it's an enormously satisfying melodrama that's on par with "Written on the Wind", my favorite of Sirk's films.