The Criterion Collection

“By now, the lesson of Douglas Sirk should be clear,” writes David Zuckerman in his auteurist review of our new special edition of Magnificent Obsession, for Film Comment: “an auteur is to be measured not by his or her accomplishments outside a system, but by his or her accomplishments within a system. What makes Sirk a point of reference, as well as a continuing subject of retrospective analysis, is that his career seems to represent the possibility of creative transcendence, the prevailing of the individual artist within a colossal machine.”

And prevailing even over some pretty outrageous material, others agree. Paper’s Dennis Dermody remarks, “This brilliant German director was able to transform hokey Hollywood melodramas into works of stunning art,” noting that the Technicolor marvel, with its “sublime stylishness” and “gorgeous color schemes”—and bringing together for the first time Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman (they would meet again in Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows)—“marked the beginning of his truly great period.” The Boston Globe also takes an auteurist approach in its review, calling the filmmaker’s whacked-out weepie “one of the irony-infused, unapologetically over-the-top melodramas that would eventually secure Sirk’s standing.”

Or, as Zuckerman writes, “Leave it to Sirk to find buried within this impossible contrivance the theme of Euripides’ Alcestis and the palette of Auguste Renoir.”

In the New York Times, Dave Kehr points out that the release is actually a two-director study in auteurism, with John M. Stahl’s 1935 version, starring Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor, as a supplement. Comparing them, Kehr writes, “illuminates the very different stylistic choices made by two masters of the melodramatic form, but also suggests how rapidly tastes evolve in popular culture . . . Believability, this fine set reminds us, is a constantly moving goal: it is no sooner reached than it recedes again.”

Update (4FEB09): The celebration continues in the Los Angeles Times, with Dennis Lim writing, “the film is astonishing for its total commitment to the plot’s nuttier aspects, the purity of feeling it brings to the most ridiculous situations.” And in the New Yorker, Richard Brody focuses on one of the release’s special features, a 1980 interview with Sirk, a “splendid extra” that “distills the director’s artistry and offers a lesson in moviemaking.”