1954 Directed by Douglas Sirk
Reckless playboy Bob Merrick crashes his speedboat, requiring emergency attention from the town’s only resuscitator while a local hero, Dr. Phillips, dies waiting for the life-saving device. Merrick then tries to right his wrongs with the doctor’s widow, Helen, falling in love with her in the process.
Obsesión, Her Şey Senin İçin, Magnifica ossessione, Le Secret magnifique, Die wunderbare Macht, 天老地荒不了情, Великолепна обсебеност, Mukaddes Azap, Великолепная одержимость, Sublime Obsessão, 마음의 등불, Sublime obsesión, Wspaniała obsesja, Lääkärin omatunto, Nádherná posedlost, En läkares samvete
Germany
Berlin Film Festival
USANR
Cleveland, Ohio
USANR
New York City, New York
USANR
FranceU
Germany12
NetherlandsAL
Brazil12
NetherlandsAL
Brazil
France
Germany
Netherlands
USA
Was so excited when a character said the title out loud and then it happened two more times!!! what a movie
love a man who learns complex brain surgery but cannot do any better than "robbie robinson" when coming up with a fake name
Sirk never read Lloyd C. Douglas' source novel (it's on Project Gutenberg Australia; I scanned a few pages before giving up), but his intellectual sensibility was firmly at odds with the minister's lukewarm New Age garbage. Rock Hudson is an uncaring millionaire who flips over his speedboat, necessitating the use of a resuscitator, belonging to one Dr. Wayne Phillips, who dies when it's not on hand. Everyone's mad at Rock, who lived only because the doctor died, which seems ridiculous (although that's late-stage unregulated capitalism; the obscenely wealthy flourish at the expense of everyone else). The late doctor was such a model human being not even his portrait can be shown, so unearthly and beyond our comprehension was his goodness…
[Quickly jotting notes down]: women love it when you widow them, blind them, and then perform amateur brain surgery on them.
Anyway, shoutout to Douglas Sirk for making one of the first ridiculous medical soap operas, I'd probably like those more too if they weren't filmed like cheap television and instead had his cinematic command of expressive shadows and lush (Techni)colors/matte paintings... That one profile shot of Jane Wyman as she's painfully describing her existential despair at living the rest of her days in darkness (where you can just barely make out the shape of her and her step daughters heads/faces due to the extreme directional lighting) is haunting. Luckily Rock Hudson was also one of the all time great…
While Sirk’s style is irresistible, the story is not as gripping as I’d like it to be, dragging as characters make nonsensical decisions. That said, Sirk created a world that looks like a vintage postcard come to life, with sweeping scores, and darkness lingering under the surface. I wish he worked with better scripts during his period of technicolor melodramas as Imitation of Life is proof he can handle more morally ambiguous material.
A gorgeous, grade A-level weepie, “Magnificent Obsession” is director Douglas Sirk at his most earnest and classical.
“Obsession,” is an utterly non ironic love story about a millionaire who gives away his wealth after falling for a doctor’s widow. It still carries subtle shades of Sirk’s abhorrence of materialism seen in his other work, but is painted in altogether softer hues.
“Obsession” isn’t the subversive critique of “All That Heaven Allows” or “Imitation of Life,” and doesn’t carry the self-knowing hysteria of “Written on the Wind.” It’s saccharine melodrama to its core.
That might discount “Obsession” in historical importance compared with Sirk’s other films, but it’s no less beautiful for that one diminishment.
Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman will come for your heart and pry it wide open, making it impossible to walk away from “Obsession” with even an iota of cynicism in your soul.
63/100
Not my favorite of the canonical Sirks—a mild disappointment that I attribute, text unread, primarily to the source material (though I've not yet seen the 1935 adaptation, a supplement on the Criterion release). There's something vaguely and—I think, but you never really know with Sirk—unintentionally creepy about the altruistic ethos that makes the rounds here; it somehow put me in mind of Scientology, even though that's a secretive pseudo-religious cult designed to separate people from their money and this is...well, a secretive philanthropic cult designed to separate people from their money. Good works performed with no desire for recognition or recompense should be uncontroversially laudable, so why does every scene promoting that idea play so damn Faustian? And it's…
"Magnificent Obsession" is supposed to refer to an obsession with doing good works, based on some vaguely Christian ideal of anonymous service to others, but Sirk and presumably the audience too recognize that the only real obsession here is the one Rock Hudson has for Jane Wyman. His guilt over his role in her continually escalating tragedies seems more like a diagonal awareness, like in a funny movie when the guy whose fault everything is says "I feel responsible, somehow." But this is not a funny movie.
Though not explicitly religious, this wouldn't make a bad double bill with the following year's ORDET. Both films find a recommitment to faith, whether in religion or self, which may be the same thing. In Sirk's world, becoming a world-class surgeon may be the new eye of the needle a rich man must pass through to gain redemption. It could also pair with L'INTRUS, as Hudson's playboy effectively gets to carry on with a heart that does not belong to him as the defibrillator that revived him should have saved another heart, and a kind of transference occurs that compels him into a different life. Sirk plays against formal expectation: the regressive behavior tends to happen in broad daylight while shadows fall over Hudson's dawning awareness of his own moral drive. Color is, as expected, so good you want to bathe in it, but it's the complexity, not the flash of its application that excites.
By the time he reached Magnificent Obsession, the first of his great late romances, Douglas Sirk had achieved a kind of melodramatic perfection whereby emotion was so exquisitely distributed across his mise-en-scène— or his mise-en-scène so artfully ornate and decorated with emotion— that his actors barely needed to enunciate, or even act, since even the smallest and most inadvertent gestures were enough to stir the whole frame into an affective tremble that was all the more convulsive for being so amorphous and mysterious in its yearnings and sorrows. That’s not to say that Magnificent Obsession is any less narratively convoluted or preposterous than his previous melodramas, but that this feels like the first film in which Sirk is confident enough to place and…
“I always dance with my eyes closed.”
Something about the way old Hollywood melodramas just envelop you with warmth. The sincerity of the emotions the lushness of the cinematography... it’s literally everything to me. Douglas Sirk and Rock Hudson were a match made in heaven especially when they had Jane wyman by their side. And Otto Kruger essentially being a gay coded guardian angel UGHHHH!!!!
