Magnificent Obsession [1954] [Criterion] (BLU)
Douglas Sirk
Synopsis
Reckless playboy Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson, in his breakthrough role) crashes his speedboat, requiring emergency attention from the town’s only resuscitator—at the very moment that a beloved local doctor has a heart attack and dies waiting for the lifesaving device. Thus begins one of Douglas Sirk’s most flamboyant master classes in melodrama, a delirious Technicolor mix of the sudsy and the spiritual in which Bob and the doctor’s widow, Helen (Jane Wyman), find themselves inextricably linked amid a series of increasingly wild twists, turns, trials, and tribulations.
Special Features:
- High-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Audio commentary from 2008 featuring film scholar Thomas Doherty
- Magnificent Obsession, John M. Stahl’s 1935 adaptation of the same novel, newly restored
- From UFA to Hollywood: Douglas Sirk Remembers (1991), a documentary by Eckhart Schmidt
- Interview from 2009 with screenwriter Robert Blees
- Interviews from 2008 with filmmakers Allison Anders and Kathryn Bigelow, in which they pay tribute to director Douglas Sirk
- Trailer
- An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien
Product Details
- Format: Color, Widescreen
- Language: English
- Subtitles: English
- Aspect Ratio: 2:35:1
- Number of Discs: 1
- Rating: Not Rated
- Label: Criterion Collection
- Release Date: 08/20/2019
- Run Time: 108 minutes
- Catalogue #: 457
- Region: A