342 - Magnificent Obsession, United States, 1954. Dir. Douglas Sirk.
Don't try this unless you're ready. You can't try it for a week like a new car. And if you think you can feather your own nest with it, just forget it. Besides, this is dangerous stuff. One of the first men who used it went to the cross at age 33.
Edward Randolph is teaching Bob Merrick how to establish contact with the source of infinite power. It is like turning on a lamp. The lightbulb is not connected to the source, so it is off. When one turns on the switch, the lamp connects all the way back to the hydroelectric dam and receives its power.
Merrick thinks about this idea. What if humans have their own powerhouse, or source of power. What if they could tap into it and turn on the switch.
Then he goes out and tries to apply this new philosophy by essentially, without realizing it, behaving the same way he always has, only to cause even more trouble.
Bob Merrick is a rich playboy. (The very opposite of his namesake, John Merrick of The Elephant Man.) He begins the movie by pushing his custom-made watercraft to speeds up to 180 mph. And naturally, he flips it. (Remember Pierce Brosnan crashing his sailboat in his version of The Thomas Crown Affair--just because he could.)
Merrick requires a resuscitator, and there is only one available in Lake Arrowhead. It belongs to Doctor Wayne Phillips. The police borrow it from his house and rush it to Merrick's side at the lake. They save him. Meanwhile, Phillips back home has an attack, which also requires the resuscitator, and without it, he dies.
The magnanimous and responsible Dr. Phillips inadvertently gives up his life so that the careless Bob Merrick may live.
When Merrick learns of this fact, after unknowingly hitting on Phillips' widow Helen, he is wracked with guilt. When he, once again recklessly, and drunkenly, crashes his car at the painter and philosopher Edward Randolph's home and is taken in by him, Randolph shares with him this philosophy. He himself learned it from Phillips, who it turns out was such a giver that when he dies it turns out he has no money. He has generously and very privately given it all away.
Phillips is like a saint.
The story, however, never deals with his not providing for his new wife and his adult daughter. They are simply left broke.
Merrick has always written checks to get himself out of the jams he causes, and he has already attempted to give the hospital--which Dr. Phillips personally owned, and which is also broke--a check for $25,000, a donation Helen Phillips immediately rejected as a bribe against his guilty conscience.
Now that he has learned this new philosophy of spiritual philanthropy, a kind of Pay It Forward, he believes all he has to do is write checks privately and good things will happen to him. When he helps out his friend Dan the valet with a cash gift of $300 and then turns around and sees Helen having lunch, he believes the gift triggered the chance meeting, and he is on his way.
No.
He is not.
He still does not understand his own forceful recklessness.
He insinuates himself onto Helen, albeit quite sincerely, and as he tactlessly follows her into the back seat of the cab, she exits the other side only to be hit by an oncoming car and blinded.
What more can Merrick do to hurt this family?
His actions have killed the husband and blinded the wife.
We now know we are fully in the territory of melodrama. The stuff of soap operas. The stuff of operas. The stuff of Greek tragedy.
The story structure is not wholly unlike Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (1931). The man falls in love with the blind woman and does everything within his power to procure a surgery that will restore her sight. In turn she falls in love with him while not knowing his identity. In fact it is the only way she is able to fall in love with him. In both cases, had she seen him from the beginning, there would never be a chance.
German-American director Douglas Sirk fits in a similar stylistic family as the Italian Luchino Visconti, the German Werner Rainer Fassbinder, and the Spanish Pedro Almodovar. His films are highly stylized and involve strong emotions, unrealistic fate-driven plot developments, love as a driving force, and overly saturated colors.
The wonderful Otto Kruger appears as Edward Randolph. You may know Kruger as the delicious villain Charles Tobin in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942) or as Judge Mettrick in High Noon (1952). By the time he plays in Magnificent Obsession, he has already had a long and successful career.
Nancy Ashford, the nurse and companion to Jane Wyman's Helen Phillips is played by the Mercury Theater staple Agnes Moorehead, known to most as Endora on Bewitched and as Charles Foster Kane's mother in Citizen Kane (1941). Moorehead is strong here as with so much of what she does.
The revelation of the film is that the magnificent obsession of the title is not a love affair, as one might presume, but something completely different.
Whatever it is, Randolph claims that once you go into it you will never give it up. It will obsess you. It will be your magnificent obsession.
on't try this unless you're ready. You can't just try it for a week like a new car And if you think you can Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=magnificent-obsession
Don't try this unless you're ready. You can't just try it for a week like a new car. And if you think you can feather your own nest with it, just forget it. Besides, this is dangerous stuff. One of the first men who used it went to the cross at the age of 33. Excuse me. Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=magnificent-obsessionon't try this unless you're ready. You
can't just try it for a week like a new car. And if you think you can Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=magnificent-obsession
Don't try this unless you're ready. You can't just try it for a week like a new car. And if you think you can feather your own nest with it, just forget it. Besides, this is dangerous stuff. One of the first men who used it went to the cross at the age of 33. Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=magnificent-obsessionDon't try this unless you're ready. You
can't just try it for a week like a new car. And if you think you can feather your own nest with it, just forget it. Besides, this is dangerous stuff. One of the first men who used it went to the cross at the age of 33. Excuse me. Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=magnificent-obsession
Don't try this unless you're ready. You can't just try it for a week like a new car. And if you think you can feather your own nest with it, just forget it. Besides, this is dangerous stuff. One of the first men who used it went to the cross at the age of 33. Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=magnificent-obsession
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