Sobre o filme:
«Sirk takes this plot (which was already committed to film in workmanlike fashion by John M. Stahl during the 1930s) and accentuates all the aspects that shouldn’t work: incidental coincidences, irrational decisions, sermons of nebulous denomination. His commitment to the ridiculous is what finesses that trademark Sirkian irony, but it’s not a safe, intelligent irony. One can’t watch Magnificent Obsession today in the same way one would All That Heaven Allows, focusing on Sirk’s ahead-of-his-time attack on small-town mentality. Magnificent Obsession is a much more mysterious beast, one that doesn’t work without a belief in Sirk’s form. In that sense, it’s the ultimate litmus test. If you pass, you might also come to realize that Hudson’s decision to overthrow rationality because the cherub choir swells to a crescendo is the movie’s best self-fulfilling metaphor.»
- Eric Henderson, in Slant
«With Magnificent Obsession, Sirk returned to this genre, but this time with a visual style that was pure 1950s: bright, wide, and jammed with the latest furnishings and consumer goods. He had found the terrain on which he would work for the rest of the decade. Perhaps 1954 was the last time this material could have been filmed with a straight face, and Sirk films it with a ferociously straight face, one might say a demonically straight face. A contemporary audience might receive the picture with peals of knowing laughter as one staggeringly fraught melodramatic moment follows another—I can remember my own jaw dropping in disbelief the first time I saw it—but what most impresses on repeated viewings of Magnificent Obsession is the strict faith Sirk keeps with his materials. He does not distort them—he merely adds layers of nuance and implicit ironic commentary that are perceptible in every composition, every gesture, every intricately swiveling camera movement, every delicately calibrated shift in lighting. (Sirk: “The angles are the director’s thoughts. The lighting is his philosophy.”)»
- Geoffrey O’Brien, in Current
