Douglas Sirk (1954)

Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson), a spoiled, rich playboy who turned his back on a medical career, crashes his speedboat.  He needs emergency treatment and rescuers borrow the nearest available resuscitator – from Dr Phillips, who lives near the lake where Merrick has had his accident.   While the machine is being used on Merrick, Phillips, the much-loved and respected head of a local clinic, suffers a badly-timed heart attack and dies.  His much younger widow, Helen (Jane Wyman), learns that she and her daughter (from a previous marriage) have been left very little money; it transpires that Phillips has been giving away his worldly goods and swearing the recipients to secrecy.   Randolph, an artist friend of Phillips, recommends this kind of sub-rosa philanthropy to the contrite Bob as the key to a good and fulfilling existence.  Moments after his first attempt at putting the philosophy into practice, Bob – who’s already trying to make up to Helen for his part in her husband’s death – causes an accident in which she is seriously injured.  When her daughter, Joyce, asks for an assurance that Helen will recover, she gets from a nurse called Nancy the cryptic response:  ‘Not completely – there’s an inoperable lesion’.  This turns out to be a fancy way of saying that Helen is blind.

Bob silently watches Helen, at first on her daily visits to the lakeside where a small girl reads to her.  A chance opportunity allows him to begin a tentative, gentle courtship.  He calls himself Robby.  Helen doesn’t recognise his voice and, unbeknown to her, he pays for her visit to the world’s best eye specialists in Switzerland, in the hope of a cure.  The case proves hopeless.  At the moment of Helen’s greatest despair, Bob arrives in her hotel room and they spend one wonderful evening together, in the course of which she says that she knows who he is but that she forgives him and loves him.  Bob asks her to marry him.  When he returns next day for her answer, Helen has disappeared with Nancy.  Bob returns to America with Joyce, with whom he’s now reconciled, and resumes his medical training.  Years later and a successful neurosurgeon (Rock Hudson has acquired a lot of grey hair round the temples), Bob receives a call from Randolph, who has heard from Nancy, after years of silence:  Helen is close to death in a New Mexico hospital.  She can be saved only by emergency brain surgery.  Bob overcomes his self-doubt and does the necessary, with Nancy lending support.  The operation saves Helen’s life and restores her sight.

I’ve summarised the plot at this length so as to remind myself of its extravagant ludicrousness and how hard I find it to spot in this film clues that Douglas Sirk is doing what (to quote the Wikipedia entry on him) revisionist admirers have seen him as doing in his Hollywood melodramas:

‘… Often centering on the formerly criticized style, his films were now seen as masterpieces of irony. The plots of the films were no longer taken at face value, and the analyses instead found that the films really criticized American society underneath the banal surface plot. The criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s was dominated by an ideological take on Sirk’s work, gradually changing from being Marxist-inspired in the early 1970s to being focused on gender and sexuality in the late 1970s and early 1980s.’

There are occasional moments in Magnificent Obsession that I can see as sexually expressive but muffled according to Production Code requirements.  When Helen learns her blindness is inoperable and moves haltingly, desperately round her hotel room, she clings momentarily to a large, impressively voluptuous vase-cum-statue before stumbling out to the balcony and knocking a paltry potted plant to the ground.   The next moment Bob enters the room; and abundant lilac blossoms play a big part in their one enchanted evening.   The angelic choirs accompanying the soupy orchestrations of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ and a Chopin étude are certainly excessive to the point of self-parody.   Otherwise, any below-the-surface elements and sophisticated statements about gender and sexuality are imperceptible to me.  Besides, the ‘surface plot’ of Magnificent Obsession isn’t really ‘banal’:  it’s semi-religiose garbage but that’s not the same thing – the plot certainly isn’t commonplace and contains in itself a critique of the excesses of self-centredness.  (This appears to be even more true of the Lloyd C Douglas novel on which both the 1935 film, with Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor, and this later adaptation are based.)

I noticed the film on daytime television and recorded it because of the Sirk connection.  Watching it was a failure in that respect, although the picture is torturously entertaining.  I also struggled to understand what the obsession was.  Randolph explains to Bob that ‘You will be obsessed – but it will be a magnificent obsession’ and that – if this isn’t enough to make it sound a big deal – it’s ‘pretty dangerous stuff:  the last man who tried this died on the cross at the age of 33’.  When Bob first tries out the technique, it’s already clear that he not only wants to make amends to Helen but that he’s attracted to her.  That he then precipitates an accident which leaves him needing to expiate a wrongdoing brought about trying to expiate the previous one doesn’t seem to be treated with any irony by Sirk and the screenwriter Robert Blees.  By this point, Bob Merrick’s primary obsession appears to be a less distinctive one:  he’s in love with Helen.   There’s an unaccountably diminishing suspense in the scenes of their courtship – even though you feel you should be getting more anxious, as they get closer, about how Helen will react once she finds out who Robby really is.   When she tells Bob she’s known for some time, he doesn’t seem incredulously relieved.  What would seem to be key emotional moments in the scheme of the story are curiously weightless.  Perhaps this is part of the deeper genius of Sirk but I don’t get it.

In the opening scenes, Jane Wyman plays grief-stricken self-control and dignity very weirdly (with a hairdo to match):  her unnatural calm is condescending and pretty alienating.   She’s easier to take once she’s gone blind – although the Academy Award nomination she received was uncalled for.  Rock Hudson is fine as a playboy within the formal security of a romantic comedy like Pillow Talk but he lacks the streak of hard selfishness needed to give impact to Bob Merrick’s transformation into the lovelorn atonement seeker.  Barbara Rush is pretty insufferable as Joyce but that goes with the part – Rush’s tense priggishness does break down into something more nuanced in the later stages.  Otto Kruger is serenely smug and knowing as Randolph.  Agnes Moorehead plays Nancy as a kind of benign Mrs Danvers.

4 March 2009