It's 1954, and we aren't quite yet in the Sirk subversive era yet, I feel. In interview with Jane Stern: "So it always is in melodrama... In Magnificent Obsession I was feeling my way. It is perhaps too much when Rock Hudson finally succeeds. This God-like creature is sitting up there. It is a good old image of God. He is benevolently smiling down on that stupid story. Of course, this is something that few critics penetrate. But I actually built the operating room for that scene. Throughout the picture this man is never being taken seriously. He's just a funny little man with crazy ideas. He's needed because down there on the operating table, a miracle really is happening. And it really has to be a Rock Hudson type there. At first he's just a stupid guy. All he can do is race his car. His change is quite impossible, and therefore just right." ('Bright Lights' film journal - which now I have to say does look somewhat pretentious.)
I'm glad Sirk also thought the story was crazy, but he was attracted to elements like the blindness (the 'antinomy' - a word Sirk likes using, meaning 'paradox') and the balance of a hidden identity, and the death of one so another can live - which he references to Euripides' 'Alcestis'... And I liked "There is a very short distance between high art and trash."
This being early late-Sirk (if you know what I mean) there aren't so many of his famous symbols evident - other than that in the hospital sequences there are a huge surfeit of flowers everywhere. All caught in the beautifully lit dark tones of Russell Metty, in the now popular 2.00:1, underscored by Frank Skinner, who seems to be borrowing Beethoven's Ninth.
Rock Hudson, Jane Wyman, Agnes Moorhead, Otto Kruger, Barbara Bates, Gregg Palmer.
Based on a novel by Lloyd C. Douglas, adapted by Wells Root, originally screenwritten by Sarah Mason and Victor Heerman, then rewritten by Robert Blees. I'm not sure we've ever seen the 1935 version (which is included on Criterion's DVD).
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