Reckless playboy Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson, in his breakthrough role) crashes his speedboat, requiring emergency attention from the town’s only resuscitator—at the very moment that a beloved local doctor has a heart attack and dies waiting for the lifesaving device.

Thus begins one of the most flamboyant master classes in melodrama from Douglas Sirk (All That Heaven Allows), a delirious Technicolor mix of the sudsy and the spiritual in which Bob and the doctor’s widow, Helen (The Lost Weekend’s  Jane Wyman), find themselves inextricably linked amid a series of increasingly wild twists, turns, trials, and tribulations.

Movie Info:

• High-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Audio commentary from 2008 featuring film scholar Thomas Doherty
• Magnificent Obsession, John M. Stahl’s 1935 adaptation of the same novel, newly restored
• From UFA to Hollywood: Douglas Sirk Remembers (1991), a documentary by German filmmaker Eckhart Schmidt
• Interviews from 2008 with filmmakers Allison Anders and Kathryn Bigelow, in which they pay tribute to Sirk
• PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien