Magnificent Obsession - The Criterion Collection - blu-ray

Magnificent Obsession - The Criterion Collection - blu-rayReckless playboy Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson, in his breakthrough role) crashes his speedboat, requiring emergency attention from the towns only resuscitatorat the very moment that a beloved local doctor has a heart attack and dies waiting for the lifesaving device. Thus begins one of the most flamboyant master classes in melodrama from Douglas Sirk (All That Heaven Allows), a delirious Technicolor mix of the sudsy and the spiritual in which Bob and the

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 the most flamboyant master classes in melodrama from Douglas Sirk (All That Heaven Allows), a delirious Technicolor mix of the sudsy and the spiritual in which Bob and the doctor’s widow, Helen (The Lost Weekend’s  Jane Wyman), find themselves inextricably linked amid a series of increasingly wild twists, turns, trials, and tribulations.

Movie Info:

• 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 German filmmaker Eckhart Schmidt
• Interviews from 2008 with filmmakers Allison Anders and Kathryn Bigelow, in which they pay tribute to Sirk
• PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien