Here’s a thumbnail of the plot for Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession: A good samaritan doctor dies due to the negligence of a callous playboy, who falls in love with the good doctor’s widow, whom he then accidentally blinds, before dedicating himself to becoming a great doctor. Got it?

Yeah, it’s utter lunacy, with characters pinballing from one absurdity to the next, never betraying that they are trapped in one of the most deliriously improbable tales in movies. The insanity of the plot is counterbalanced by the cinematic mastery at work—the detail of Sirk’s mise-en-scène, the glorious costuming, and the rapturous Russell Metty photography. It’s quite a brew. And it’s a masterpiece.

Sirk, a German emigree with a serious theater background, was well aware of it all, saying, “Magnificent Obsession is a combination of kitsch and craziness and trashiness. But craziness is very important, and it saves trashy stuff like Magnificent Obsession. This is the dialectic—there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains the element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.”

And thus the high-concept Hollywood camp melodrama was born.

The film launched Rock Hudson, who would spend a good part of the next decade as Hollywood’s #1 box-office star. He and Jane Wyman have an undeniable chemistry, which they reprised in Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, probably his greatest film. They’re joined in both films by the glorious Agnes Moorehead.

Magnificent Obsession, like all of Sirk’s melodramas, was a huge box-office hit, but heavily slagged by critics. The French came around first, of course, offering rapturous reviews in Cahiers du Cinéma (Godard, in particular, was smitten). The critical re-evaluation of Sirk began in 1970, and his films have been a major influence on such directors as Rainer Werner Fassbender, John Waters, Pedro Almodovar, and, of course, Todd Haynes, whose Far From Heaven is an extended homage to All That Heaven Allows.

Sirk had other huge hits in the same vein—Written on the Wind, with Dorothy Malone’s over-the-top, Oscar-winning, oil-well-fondling performance; and the lavish remake of Imitation of Life—but Magnificent Obsession came first, and its melding of haywire plot with cinematic excellence makes it The One for us at VTIFF.