There are melodramas and then there are Douglas Sirk melodramas, which is a whole other gilded gazebo apart from the rest. Grass is rarely greener, water rarely glistens as much, exotic paint jobs on new cars rarely shine this brightly and love is rarely more tragic and stormy than it is through Sirk’s relentless eye. His films give us the dark side of Heaven. The settings are beautiful while the characters are miserable. It’s all so over the top that something feels fascinatingly wrong. We can see the puppet-master working (which is why Sirk is such an enduring hero of The Auteur Theory) and he seems awfully cynical about these tortured souls onscreen. Sirk had been directing films for twenty years by the time he made Magnificent Obsession, the first of his celebrated soapy masterpieces made with the key collaborative team of ultra-commercial producer Ross Hunter, cinematography master Russell Metty and chiseled future star Rock Hudson. Hudson plays a repellent Richie Rich who has a boating accident, caused by his own stupidity, that requires the need of a resuscitating machine to save his life and the only one nearby is owned by a beloved local doctor, who loans it out. By sheer fucking coincidence, that same doctor then has a heart attack and dies that very hour because he doesn’t have his resuscitator. So now EVERYBODY in this otherwise peaceful and affluent lakeside community HATES Rock Hudson. They think that fate took the wrong man that day, which sends ol’ Rock on a mission to redeem himself and make things right with the widow, Jane Wyman, who hates him, too. One tragedy isn’t enough in a story like this though, and Wyman eventually has her own accident (that tangentially involves poor Rock Hudson again) and suffers maybe the worst thing that could happen to anyone in the silky sumptuous day-glo dream world of a Douglas Sirk film: she goes blind. In a move that would be ultra-creepy today, but that plays as romantic here, Hudson then moves in on Wyman, befriending her and eventually romancing her under cover of a fake name and with his new selfless outlook on life. If you start swooning by then, you’re never gonna stop.