For some values of magnificent

Another of the movies that I recently watched is the 1954 version of Magnificent Obsession.

Rock Hudson plays Bob Merrick, a playboy who's Clearly Bad. He went through about a year of med school but dropped out to do things like go out on his high-speed boat on a lake in some small town in the Northeast. He gets in an accident, and is injured enough that he needs a "resuscitator", some sort of device normally used on heart attack patients.

The only resuscitator was owned by one Dr. Phillips, a man of Pure Virtue as the movie would have you believe, although fans of socialized medicine would point out that he kept that damn resuscitator for his personal use. That and, as we'll learn, he spent all his money giving other people free shit at his medical clinic, to the point that he's heavily in debt. As it turns out, Dr. Phillips had another heart attack just at the time that Bob had his accident, and obviously would have been saved if that resuscitator had been there.

Bob tries to express his contrition to the doctor's wife Helen (Jane Wyman) and daughter Joyce (Barbara Rush), but he seems to think he can buy his way out of any situation with money, and the two women are having none of that, showing none of the doctor's presumed capacity for forgiveness that he must have had since he was such a Perfect Person if you believe the way everybody else in the movie talks about him.

Things get even worse when Bob, trying to make it up to Mrs. Phillips, follows her into a taxi. She tries to get out the other side, getting run down in traffic and suffering a brain injury that probably should have killed her like Natasha Richardson but, since we wouldn't have a second half of the movie then, only blinds her. Bob runs into her on the beach one day and realizes she doesn't recognize his voice! So now he can put the moves on her while trying to expiate his sins by paying to send her to Europe to get an operation that might restore his sight.

Bob eventually follows her to Europe and Joyce eventually forgives him. But when Helen learns who Bob really is, she's not certain how to react, and when he proposes marriage to her, she runs off to the middle of nowhere, not telling anybody!

Magnificent Obsession is a bunch of nonsensical moral twaddle, which shouldn't be surprising since it's based on the novel by Lloyd C. Douglas, a Christian apologist who gave us other books turned into movies like Green Light and The Robe. Those other movies aren't bad even though they lay on the Christian morality a little thick at times. Magnificent Obsession, on the other hand, is even more black-and white in its portrayal of morality than the others, and has overblown direction from Douglas Sirk to boot.

I'm glad I watched Magnificent Obsession to get it off the list of movies I hadn't blogged about here before. But it's not a movie I'm looking to watch a second time. You can get it on a pricey two-DVD set from the Criterion Collection if you want to watch for yourself or like this sort of movie.