Douglas Sirk's inaugural "women's-picture" weepy for Universal, based on a preachy, dogmatic, didactic novel by the intolerable Lloyd C. Douglas (author of that other beloved piece of crap, *The Robe*). Rock Hudson, in the role that catapulted him to stardom, plays Bob Merrick, a drunken playboy worth untold millions who is more interested in chasing skirts and racing speedboats than in finishing his medical degree. In the first scene, he wrecks his boat on a sumptuously photographed lake. The accident nearly kills Merrick, and thus he requires a rather mysterious "resuscitator machine" to keep him alive . . . meanwhile, across town, beloved surgeon Dr. Phillips finally drops dead from a heart condition. Since the local hospital can maintain only one resuscitator at a time, Phillips dies so that the louse may live. When Merrick learns of this, he tries to make apologetic overtures to Phillips' family, especially to the widow (Jane Wyman, coiffed and clothed in matronly hauteur), but indeed anyone and everyone who knew the surgeon spits at Merrick like a brace of cobras. One doctor on the hospital staff even calls it "a total waste" that the playboy lived instead of the Christ-like surgeon. Hippocrates might have had something to say about that!
These early scenes are where you'll find the typical Sirkian iconoclasm: the director rubs our faces so much in the unpleasantness of middle-class, mid-century America, that one finds oneself rooting for the wastrel playboy to put whoopee-cushions under the ramrod fannies of these moral hypocrites. But, alas, no: the risible plot of the novel must proceed, and Merrick soon finds himself getting converted by God, in the guise of pipe-puffing Otto Kruger, an artist who claims that Phillips made him a better man and even a better painter. (Why don't we see any of this amazing art?) We learn that the intolerably ubiquitous Dr. Phillips would often refuse payment for medical services rendered (though who exactly qualified for these "magnificent exemptions" is never made clear). This is supposed to provide our hero with a whole new outlook on life and an example of personal conduct. Kruger even tries to make it all sound very illicitly exciting: "Once you start this thing, there's no way out of it! It's an obsession . . . a MAGNIFICENT obsession!" So Merrick tries it out by AGAIN pestering the widow with apologetic overtures, but he somehow causes her to get hit by a car. She loses her eyesight. Apparently, Merrick will have several more stations-of-the-cross to trudge past before he can be accounted a decent fellow.
But Sirk continues to sneak in his revenges even as the movie grows more and more preachy. The most obvious bit has to be the presence of Agnes Moorehead as the head hospital nurse and Wyman's friend and unrequited lesbian lover. Note the disappointment on Moorehead's face when Merrick, finally redeemed as a doctor, shows up to save Wyman's life near the end. Hudson's own homosexuality, an open secret in Hollywood at the time, is also used to great ironic effect. He and Wyman -- dowdy and fifteen years older -- generate absolutely zero erotic heat in their scenes together, which, by the way, are purposefully few, presumably because any more scenes between the stars would hopelessly expose this whole enterprise. (One thing we feel certain of: if Rock Hudson was obsessed by anything, it certainly wasn't Jane Wyman.) It's a chronic case of *Tea and Sympathy*. Sirk seemed to enjoy tweaking everyone's noses by having this gay actor -- who was attractive to the innocent ladies of the era -- coolly drift through these exquisitely-colored "women's pictures". In fact, the director worked with Hudson 6 or 7 more times, to best effect in the follow-up to this film, *All That Heaven Allows*, which re-teamed Hudson with Wyman but was also accompanied by a realistic plot. In *Obsession*, meanwhile, we must endure God/Kruger gazing beneficently down from an observation-window onto Merrick and his medical team as they prepare to save Wyman's life, in tandem with a musical score of swelling vocals from a cheesy Hollywood choir.
But to see why Sirk is considered an auteur, check out the scene wherein Wyman explains to her grown daughter that she can in fact tell the difference from night and day. The entire frame is blackened, here: the daughter is barely visible, and Wyman's face is faintly silhouetted against a faint light. She goes on to say that she hates the night because "I know that Dawn will never come again". A great, chilling moment that deserves a much better movie than *Magnificent Obsession*.
4 stars out of 10.
