A look back at this day in film history......... Dec. 30, 1935 MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION OPENS: The opening of John Stahl’s melodrama Magnificent Obsession at the end of the 1935 marked the midway point of the journey for this mystical story. In 1929, before all hell broke loose with the Stock Market crash, Lloyd C. Douglas, a evangelical minister, published a novel of sorts that exalted the mystical power of charity and giving. Framed in a pseudo-scientific ideology, the novel described a powerful secret, how giving of oneself freely could transform one’s life. The story showed how self-serving rich playboy, whose rash accidents lead to the death of a noted doctor, and then later to the blindness of his wife, turned himself into a world-class brain surgeon to remedy his wrongs. His journey of atonement is more sermon than story, but its message of redemption caught the public’s attention and made the book a best seller well into the depression. With much less altruistic motives, Universal bought up rights for a film adaptation, and gave the book to John Stahl to direct with favorite Irene Dunne and newcomer Robert Taylor to star. While not a critical favorite (the New York Times panned it as “tedious and overwrought”), the film was a commercial hit, and made Taylor (who been loaned out from MGM) a star. Some twenty years, later Jane Wyman, wanting to reprise the Irene Dunne role, pushed Douglas Sirk to remake it. Sirk recounted that, “Ross Hunter gave me the book, and I tried to read it, but I just couldn’t. It is the most confused book you can imagine. It is so abstract in many respects that I couldn’t see a picture in it.” So Sirk simply remade Stahl’s film as a sumptuous wide-screen, Technicolor melodrama with another newcomer Rock Hudson as the lead.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 03:58:00 +0000
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