A wealthy young wastrel, Bob Merrick, cracks up his speedboat and almost
dies, to be saved at the last minute by a resuscitator borrowed from the home of
a famous surgeon who lives nearby. In the meantime the surgeon himself has
suffered an attack, and, with his equipment out on loan, dies before he can be
revived. The guilt-ridden Bob clumsily tries to make amends by romancing the
surgeon’s young widow, Helen, but only causes further tragedy: escaping his
embrace, she is struck by a car and blinded.
Having belatedly learned his lesson, Bob returns to the medical studies he
dropped years before, and within a couple of dissolves has become a Nobel
Prize-winning brain surgeon. When Helen falls into a coma, only one doctor
has the expertise to operate and bring her out of it — and, as a side benefit,
restore her sight. When she opens her eyes, will the first face she sees be that
of the man who caused her so much grief — but who, thanks to his love for her,
has now found redemption?
This, highly abstracted, is the plot of “Magnificent
Obsession,” a 1929 best seller by Lloyd C. Douglas that inspired two
successful films: a 1935 version starring Robert
Taylor as Bob, and Irene
Dunne as Helen, and directed by John M. Stahl, and a more celebrated 1954
remake featuring Rock
Hudson and Jane
Wyman, under the direction of Douglas
Sirk.
As a story, it contains almost all the elements of the classic “women’s
picture,” raised to a delirious degree: outrageous coincidences that turn out to
reveal the hand of a benevolent fate; a love so pure and chaste that it
transforms a scoundrel into a saint; a man who is willing to make the ultimate
sacrifice — putting the life of the woman he loves at risk —to save her.
The Criterion Collection has issued both versions of “Magnificent Obsession”
as a double-disc set, a release similar to Universal’s pairing of the Stahl
(1934) and Sirk (1959) versions of “Imitation
of Life” last February. (There is yet a third Stahl-Sirk showdown, between
Stahl’s 1939 “When
Tomorrow Comes” and Sirk’s 1957 remake, retitled “Interlude,” which will be shown at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan on Jan. 28). The
side-by-side comparison made possible by these twin sets not only illuminates
the very different stylistic choices made by two masters of the melodramatic
form, but also suggests how rapidly tastes evolve in popular culture.
The relatively sober, straightforward Stahl version of “Magnificent
Obsession” actually represents a work of extensive and judicious pruning by the
team of screenwriters (Sarah Y. Mason, Victor Heerman and George O’Neil)
assigned to adapt the original novel. The Douglas book turns out to be an
all-but-unreadable, proto-New Age hodgepodge of mystical self-help advice
(strangely similar to the philosophy of the Kevin
Spacey career-killer “Pay It
Forward”), smothered in some of the most turgid prose imaginable.
Stahl’s dry sensibility slices right through that, imposing visual patterns
and thematic symmetries on the material in a way that gives it shape and
emotional resonance. During the first part of the film, Taylor is frequently
shown in horizontal repose — unconscious on a gurney, stretched out in a
hospital bed, passed out and sleeping on a marble bier.
Dunne, playing the stronger, more mature character, stands over him as a
parent might stand over a child, until her accident forces them to reverse both
their roles and their positions in the frame.
Stahl’s unemphatic black-and-white photography and confined studio sets allow
little in the way of lyrical expansion (one exception is a marvelous diorama of
the bridges of Paris, each with miniature cars driving across it, that appears
behind Dunne and Taylor when they step out on a balcony).
But Sirk, working in unbridled Technicolor, develops a lush mise-en-scène
around spacious interiors and sweeping natural vistas, a style that both
underscores the romantic extravagances of the plotting and almost cruelly
undermines them, given that one of the principal characters is unable to see her
surroundings at all.
“Magnificent Obsession” was the first of Sirk’s big-budget, Technicolor
melodramas for Universal, but he was already working with distancing devices —
action reflected in mirrors or hard surfaces; colors so bright that they seem to
detach themselves from the physical world; insignificant objects that loom up in
the frame and displace the human performers — that would drive later
masterpieces of cinematic subversion like “All
That Heaven Allows” (1955) and “Written
on the Wind” (1956).
And yet, reviewing Sirk’s film for The New York Times in 1954, Howard H.
Thompson praised it for its realism and restraint, relative to the Stahl
version, locating the difference in the more naturalistic acting style that had
come into vogue in the ’50s:
“Primary credit for mooring the picture to an earthly and earthy plane
belongs to the two stars. In appealing contrast to Miss Dunne’s pristine
languor, Miss Wyman is, as usual, refreshingly believable throughout. And
playing his first major role, the strapping, manly Mr. Hudson gives a fine,
direct account of himself, in the film’s only real surprise.”
Fifty-five years on, the Wyman and Hudson performances seem almost equally as
studied and poised as those of Dunne and Taylor. What happened in the interim,
of course, was the even greater revolution of Method acting. Already in the air
in 1954 (the year of “On the
Waterfront”), the Method would soon be established as the new standard of
realism, consigning Hudson and Taylor alike to the dustbin of thespian history.
I can attest that Hudson’s performance earned howls of laughter at film
society screenings in the mid- ’70s, at the moment when Robert
De Niro and Al
Pacino were scaling the Method heights. But if viewers feel less inclined to
laugh at Hudson now, it may be because the cracks in the Method have begun to
appear, and Mr. De Niro and Mr. Pacino (as in, for example, the recent “Righteous
Kill”) themselves now seem mannered and quaint.
Believability, this fine set reminds us, is a constantly moving goal: it is
no sooner reached than it recedes again. (The Criterion Collection, $39.95, not
rated)