"Sublime Stylishness"   Douglas Sirks's 1954 Technicolor classic of melodrama MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION will screen three times this week at the Charles. 1954 Dir. Douglas Sirk. Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Barbara Rush, Agnes Moorehead, Otto Kruger. 108 m. Technicolor. "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 beloved local Dr. Phillips has a heart attack and dies waiting for the life-saving device. Thus begins one of Douglas Sirk's most flamboyant master classes in melodrama, a delirious Technicolor mix of the sudsy and the spiritual in which Bob and the doctor's widow, Helen (Jane Wyman), find themselves inextricably linked amid a series of increasingly wild twists, turns, trials, and tribulations." -Criterion Collection SHOWTIMES Saturday, April 17 - Noon; Monday, April 19 - 7 PM; Thursday, April 22 - 9 PM. "This brilliant German director was able to transform hokey Hollywood melodramas into works of stunning art." - Dennis Dermody "One of the irony-infused, unapologetically over-the-top melodramas that would eventually secure Sirk's standing." - The Boston Globe "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." - Dennis Lim "The surface isn’t really the surface, but rather a manifestation of the depths." - Douglas Sirk "...Sirk, working in unbridled Technicolor, develops a lush mise-en-scène around spacious interiors and sweeping natural vistas, a style that both underscores the romantic extravagances of the plotting and almost cruelly undermines them, given that one of the principal characters is unable to see her surroundings at all. 'Magnificent Obsession' was the first of Sirk's big-budget, Technicolor melodramas for Universal, but he was already working with distancing devices -- action reflected in mirrors or hard surfaces; colors so bright that they seem to detach themselves from the physical world; insignificant objects that loom up in the frame and displace the human performers -- that would drive later masterpieces of cinematic subversion like 'All That Heaven Allows' and 'Written on the Wind'." - Dave Kehr Next Week: Vittorio De Sica's UMBERTO D. Revival Series 35 mm Prints Charles Theatre 1711 N. Charles Street (410) 727-FILM