Sirk’s mystical, crazy ‘Obsession’

Born to Danish parents in Germany in 1900, Douglas Sirk led a life as filled with unlikely twists as some of his more outlandish movies. A stage director during the Weimar years, he turned to the cinema after coming under Nazi scrutiny for his leftist leanings and soon found a home at the venerable film studio UFA.

In the late ‘30s, Sirk and his wife, who was Jewish, left Germany for California, where he changed his name (from Detlef Sierck) and reinvented himself again, first as a director of sophisticated low-budget movies (such as the 1944 Chekhov adaptation “Summer Storm”) and then in the ‘50s as Universal’s leading purveyor of opulent Technicolor weepies.

Sirk’s reputation has been subject to its ebbs and flows. His ‘50s melodramas were popular with audiences, but he was far from a critics’ favorite, and it did not help that he retired after his biggest success, “Imitation of Life” (1959), and moved to Switzerland.

French critics, in particular the young Turks of Cahiers du Cinema, always had championed him, and their enthusiasm began to spread in the ‘70s, thanks to the reappraising eye of academics and the publication of Jon Halliday’s “Sirk on Sirk,” a book-length interview in which the director held forth with considerable erudition on his own work.

The great German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder modeled “Fear Eats the Soul” (1974), one of his best-known films, on his countryman’s “All That Heaven Allows” (1955), which was also the basis for Todd Haynes’ “Far From Heaven” (2002).

Sirk lived long enough to witness his revival (he died in 1987) and is now part of the Hollywood pantheon: a textbook auteur who thrived within the confines of the studio system and the premier chronicler of Eisenhower-era America, at once caustic and compassionate.

The Criterion Collection, already having released his most fully rehabilitated ‘50s titles, “All That Heaven Allows” and “Written on the Wind” (1956), now turns its attention to “Magnificent Obsession” (1954), the film that kicked off his string of hits and launched the career of his quintessential actor, Rock Hudson.

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A manipulative film

“Magnificent Obsession” has the distinction of being Sirk’s craziest movie, a delirious melodrama-squared premised on shameless manipulation, wild coincidence and mystical gibberish.

Swaggering playboy Bob Merrick (Hudson) crashes his speedboat in the opening sequence and finds himself tangled in a cosmic web of cause and effect.

He’s saved by the resuscitator of a beloved doctor, who suffers a fatal heart attack while Bob is being revived. Shaken when he learns that his life is now tied to another man’s death, Bob begins a guilt-ridden journey of atonement.

He learns that the doctor was a kind of undercover saint, devoted to secretive good deeds and the notion of charity as “a source of infinite power.” “This is dangerous stuff,” says the mysterious artist (Otto Kruger) who initiates Bob into the philosophy. “One of the first men who used it went to the cross at the age of 33.”

Bob’s fervent desire to make amends with the doctor’s widow, Helen (Jane Wyman), results in an accident that blinds her, and the plot complications get only more outrageous from there.

By the end, a quasi-religious transfiguration has taken place, with Merrick filling the shoes of the Jesus figure who died so that others could live.

This crackpot vision of redemption came from a bestselling 1929 novel by Lloyd C. Douglas, which had been adapted by the director John M. Stahl in 1935, with Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor. (The Criterion release includes the Stahl film on a second disc.)

Stahl’s “Magnificent Obsession” mutes the mystical subtext. Sirk’s version gives it room to breathe.

Decked out in bright, sumptuous colors (which dim somewhat after Helen loses her sight) and a swelling score complete with celestial choir, the film is astonishing for its total commitment to the plot’s nuttier aspects, the purity of feeling it brings to the most ridiculous situations.

Present-day audiences tend to respond to Sirk’s melodramas with knowing laughter. But it is misleading to think of his films as satires and reductive to see his worldview as simply ironic.

His best movies are complex, dizzying in their accumulations of cross purposes and double meanings.

“There is a very short distance between high art and trash,” Sirk said. That might be so, but few directors have ever bridged that distance with such ingenuity and conviction.

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