Magnificent Obsession (1954)

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

I have to disagree with the previous person's review. This movie is so good and moving and reflects the time it was made in. Jane Wyman does look older than Rock but I think its that horrible short bob of a hairstyle she wears but I realize it was her trademark look throughout her career even up until the TV show Falcon Crest. If you like sentimental movies you can really lose yourself in and really suspend your imagination , you'll love this. Also I couldn't help but notice the similarities in looks between Elvis and Rock, they could've been brothers! All in all, a very good movie.

When I saw this for the first time I already knew the plot in the film. The script for this is really horrible. I understand why the director did not want to make it. I knew the climax of the film before it was 30 minutes old. I hung around hoping it would get better. It did not.The film has little to say in favor of it for me except for Hudson who tries desperately to make it seem real. No one could bring that off. He is too young to be romancing Wyman and too old to be with the younger actress.Think this could be redone better starting with a new script. Then we need to get more dramatic moments in it. This one definitely is not the best platform for any one in the cast. I think this could have been so much better, a waste of talent and some of the window scenes are obviously fake. Universal did no one any favors with this movie.

Because now we've got Technicolor, Widescreen, Ross Hunter, Douglas Sirk, and more importantly, Rock Hudson. He takes on the practically impossible task of playing this sinner-to-saint transformation, and almost makes it work, if not totally. Jane Wyman lacks the youthful effervescence of Irene Dunne from the original, but gives a beautifully restrained performance nonetheless. Otto Kruger expands on Ralph Morgan's role of the artist (here a painter instead of a sculptor) who expresses the film's moral.This being a soap opera like premise, it is more than appropriate that the film focuses on two "Guiding Light's", Kruger and the compassionate nurse, played her by Agnes Moorehead who fortunately gets to be somewhat tough in her duties, yet kindly compassionate under that Endora red hair of hers. Barbara Rush adds some more layers to the sweetness of her stepdaughter character.Hudson and Wyman at first seem an odd couple to be paired with in a spiritual secret storm mean to give the matinée ladies a good cry away from the daily viewings of "Love of Life" and "Search For Tomorrow", and the film rises above the stories clichés. Made on the success of another film version of a Lloyd C. Douglas novel ("The Robe"), this takes the life lesson of being kind and helpful to strangers without expecting anything back in return to a modern level. It utilizes beautiful locations and a lush musical score to flesh out its already melodramatic tale. In an era of exotic beauties like Monroe, Taylor, Loren and Lollobrigida (or down home girls like Doris Day), Wyman's box-office success with this is a nice reflection on the 1950's environment where a box in a living room was sometimes keeping people from going to the movies, except, like in the case of this movie, when they really had something worth going to.

Douglas Sirk is often praised some 50 years after his career ended for being one of the most subversive and bittersweet of Hollywood directors of the 1950s. Born in Germany, he began his film career in the German cinema, only to flee when the Nazis took control. By the mid 1940s, he was a full-fledged Hollywood director assigned by studios to churn out as many films as possible. However, even after all these years, it is clear that like fellow immigrant directors Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch, there was a dark undertone in all of Sirk's works that continues to amaze today.The first of Sirk's most well-known films was Magnificent Obsession, a glossy Technicolor melodrama that on the surface appears to be as soapy and exploitative as any daytime television drama. However, many critics and scholars in recent years have instructed us to look closer, to try and understand the hidden meanings and undertones of such a story. Clearly, it is obvious that Sirk used such a decor and platform as that was what he was given to work with. Melodramas were becoming quite popular in the 1950s, this itself being a reflection of the growing artifice and superficial decadence that would come to characterize postwar America. Sirk, being a European immigrant, would know and recognize this better than almost anyone. Therefore, he brilliantly used American settings, characterizations and story lines to subject to American audiences the very ideas and social graces he saw through. Just as expected, people fell for the bait and came in droves to witness what they though was simply a tearjerker exploring the relationship between a spoiled rich playboy and a well-meaning widow of a revered doctor.Though it may be impossible to truly grasp all of Sirk's secrets after just one viewing, it seems to me that one of the critiques most notable here is the motivation these characters possess. Another reviewer described this film as a quest for spirituality. Redemption and understanding may also be added to this list as nearly all of these characters attempt to find consolation and faith in things that reflect their own artificial emotion and feelings. Do any of these characters truly have a moral center that guides their everyday actions? Or are they simply living out of guilt, fear, jealousy and self-loathing? These are loaded questions to be sure, but the more I write the more I am convinced that Magnificent Obsession is a loaded film.