Recapping 'Magnificent Obsession' from Memory

For some reason

As a Person of Criterion Experience, I don’t “watch movies.” I engage with cinema. Only the finest cuts of meat satisfy my refined palate for motion pictures. There’s nothing like donning my velvet robe, swirling a glass of Merlot, firing off an abusive tweet to Dr. Mehmet Oz, and browsing the offerings on the Criterion Channel’s homepage. 

For those of you who don’t know what Criterion is, pretend your Netflix subscription had an MFA and was wearing a turtleneck. 

It was during one of my hundreds of international flights to exotic and sexual locations that I came across the film Magnificent Obsession (1954) starring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman on the Criterion for iPad app. It’s been around a year since I first watched it, and this movie still occupies an apartment in my mind. Consider this post my attempt at evicting it. 

So here it is, my recap, summary, and review of Magnificent Obsession (1954), written from memory because I absolutely don’t want to watch it again. All inaccuracies are in service of conveying a general vibe. 

Directed by Douglas Sirk, Magnificent Obsession (1954) tells the story of a wealthy, arrogant playboy who accidentally kills some lady’s husband, joins a cult that causes him to fall in love with that same lady, pushes her into oncoming traffic by being a creep, and then does surgery on her with his new cult powers. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but we’ll get into it. 

Oh, we’ll get into it.

Let’s back up a smidge. Hudson plays Robert Merrick. He’s got the women, the cash, and the jet ski which he immediately crashes into a dock within seconds of the film’s opening. The only thing that can save him is this box (a “resuscitator,” but it’s a box in the movie) located in the home of one Dr. Phillip, who lives across the lake. The rescuers take the box from Dr. Phillip’s house, who coincidentally has a heart attack and dies.

Robert wakes up from his coma. Not to worry, he’s still hot and his near-death accident hasn’t left a scratch on him, which is good news for us, the viewers. Everyone in this hospital is super mad at Robert, and he’s not sure why. But it’s okay because no one really likes him in general, and he doesn’t necessarily see the poors as “people.” He escapes his room and hitches a ride with a kind woman, Helen, played by Jane Wyman. Little do they know, fate has extremely silly plans in store for them. 

While chatting with Helen (MILF), our spoiled rich boy learns the terrible truth: The box they used to bring him back to life was taken from the home of her husband, Dr. Phillip, at the exact moment he suffered a heart attack. I wonder what selfish idiot was hogging the box while her husband was dying. Well, who knows, and anyway she was just heading to her dead husband’s hospital now.

Robert hits her with the “damn that’s brazy” and dips. Helen gets to the hospital to settle her super dead husband’s affairs, like charging his sick patients for the remainder of their bills, but it turns out none of his patients owe them money. All their debts were paid off by some mysterious person. No, it’s not the millionaire. Don’t worry about it for now. “Wild,” says Helen.

Meanwhile, as it turns out, Robert does have a conscience because he’s really sad that he took the box from Dr. Phillip, thus murdering him. He drinks his sadness away and gets into a car accident, crashing into the home of Edward Randolph, a successful artist and friend of the deceased Dr. Phillip. He’s super chill about a drunk driver plowing a car into his home, because he’s low-key in a cult that really zens him out. 

“Tell me more about this fun cult,” Robert says in the morning amid the wreckage of Edward Randolph’s living room. 

“Oh, my cult?” Edward Randolph says, whimsically. “Have you ever seen a lamp? When you pull the chain, the light comes on, right? But no one knows where the light comes from.” (Not how electricity works, but go off, king.) “Kindness is like that. We are lamps and kindness is the mysterious unknown energy that lights us up. I’m an artist, not an engineer, by the way.”

“Nice,” Robert says. “So acts of kindness are the key to a good life.”

“No,” Edward Randolph says. “Don’t be gay. Acts of kindness are the key to psychic abilities. When you do something good for a complete stranger without any expectation of a reward, this actually makes a ripple in the fabric of the universe, which sends energy waves across reality. You can absorb those waves and become a demigod with fame and bitches.” 

“Wow, that’s so much better,” Robert says. “I’m in.”

It should be mentioned that Dr. Phillip was also in this cult, and this is why all his patients didn’t owe him any money. He wasn’t charging them, which is no way to run a business in these, our United States. But I digress. Helen is left with no money because of this, by the way. Flop.

Right. First order of business to turn on Robert’s lamp is to hunt down Helen Phillips and do something nice for her. That’s nowhere near what the instructions were, but boys will be boys. He finds Helen at a fancy outdoor lunch and attempts violent, aggressive kindness with her, but unfortunately for him, Helen has since learned that Robert was the one who intentionally and maliciously killed her husband by taking his favorite box out of the house.

“No, Mr. Robert, I should think I won’t be seeing you tonight,” she says in that old Hollywood accent, or however movie stars talked back then. She gets up in a huff and marches out onto the street and is hit by a car and blinded. :(

I suppose she won’t be seeing anyone that night. 

Everyone  is really mad at our boy Robert now, because he killed Dr. Phillips then blinded his surviving wife. Who does he think he is, really, to be doing all that? Robert realizes his problem was that he wasn’t doing kindness hard enough, which is difficult to believe considering he did kindness so hard it literally and permanently disabled someone, but that’s where his head goes regardless.

He recommits to the lamp cult and starts studying to be a doctor while keeping a close eye on Helen. Somehow this film doesn’t become a horror movie at this point. It’s still doing wet, sappy melodrama because this is a film for silly geese and by silly geese. He watches Helen on the beach, who looks like this now. Very obviously blind, as you can tell by the sunglasses.

I do remember audibly mumbling “no way” on the plane at this point. 

Under the alias “Robby” (nice, well done), Robert pretends to be a broke medical student without altering his voice whatsoever and successfully romances Helen by reading her the funnies. She has no idea, meanwhile, that he’s the one who has brought all this suffering to her life. The blindness is new, but the goofiness is not.

Robert continues this weirdo behavior while simultaneously using his rich-person connections to find a doctor who can restore Helen’s eyesight. At last, he finds a group of doctors in Switzerland who are willing to experiment on her. Success! Just as the lamp said would happen. 

Helen flies to Switzerland where the doctors are sad to say ze melodrama is inoperable. Helen is sad, of course, but who has come all the way to see her? Robby, of course! That beloved broke medical student who sounds a little like the man who chased her into traffic. How wonderful that he was able to quickly book an international flight in the ‘50s when people were still riding chariots pulled by pigeons to fly.

“Oh, Robby,” she says, etc.

Robby decides to treat Helen to the best night of her life by going out in a Swiss village where the townsfolk are busy dancing and burning a witch to death in the town square. “Can you feel the flames?” Robby asks. “Isn’t it lovely?”

“Oh, Robby, it’s marvelous. Would that I could watch that witch burn.”

Sure, she’s on a date with her personal angel of death and the guy who’s been stalking her for most of the film, but all in all she’s having a good time. Dating is hard and it’s valid to settle for the question mark who reads you funnies on the beach. 

“I do need to tell you that I’m not Robby, but Robert, the man you might know as the guy who killed your husband and snatched the sight from your sockets like the Grinch stole Christmas,” says Rob, the absolute dude. 

“That’s fine,” Helen says. “I think I knew.” I’m in no place to tell women in the ‘50s what they should and shouldn’t do, I suppose. 

It seems like all will end well for our happy couple, but then Helen does something really weird where she disappears in the middle of the night right before Robert can propose. She leaves a note: 

My dearest Robby,

I could never force you to be with a blind lady, the most detestable and unlovable type of lady there is. You deserve better, which is why I’ve forced my maid to follow me around the world forever while I hide from you in increasingly peculiar locations. She’s also kindly writing this letter for me as I speak it aloud. I hate this crazy white bitch with my whole life you have no fucking idea. 

Thank you for the wonderful memories.

Signed,

Bozo the Clown. Honk-Honk!

“This is a nightmare,” Robert says. “I will dedicate the rest of my life to finding her.” 

So, he does, and meanwhile he gets really good at doing surgery on people. I’m all but certain you know what’s coming, but I’ll spell it out anyway: He finally finds Helen in some remote mountain town where she is dying of terminal corniness that has spread from her eyes into her brain. 

“Oh, hello,” the resident doctor says upon seeing Robert. “I’m pretty ugly and useless, so I don’t think I can save her. It would be a different story if someone around here was hot and capable. We had a brilliant surgeon you’ve never heard of before who worked here, but he’s dead now.”

“How awful,” he says. “How did she even end up here?”

“Some woman in a French maid outfit threw her out of a moving car. I set her up on a bed and now I’m waiting for her to die.”

“It will be the challenge of a lifetime,” Robert says, “but I’ll do it. I’ll do the operation. I’ll drill a hole in the skull and remove the cringe from her brain.” At this point the actual ghost of the unknown surgeon that was mentioned a literal minute ago shows up, puts his hand on Robert’s shoulder and says, “I’ll be watching over you, son.”

Hours later, Helen wakes. Robert stands over her, beaming, horny. 

“Robert, what are you doing here, and where did that nice old man who works at this hospital go?”

“Who do you think gave you your new eyes, darling?” Robert asks.

“I can see!” she exclaims. They kiss. A lamp turns on. Fin.

Okay. That’s roughly the film. I think. Let’s take a moment to unpack. 

Magnificent Obsession is a landmark film that bridged the two great American pastimes: being weird to women and insensitive to the blind. It’s important that we judge it within its historical context. No one back then could have possibly known Rock Hudson was gay. Though not a perfect film, it would go on to influence pop culture well into the present day, providing the inspiration for the Uchiha clan in Naruto. 

3 ½ Criterions out of 5 Criterions.

Let me know what I should watch next.