Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2878 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-01-15
• Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
• Formats: Box set, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 7
• Running time: 653 minutes

Synopsis
Features the Douglas Sirk films HAS ANYONE SEEN MY GAL?, ALL I DESIRE, MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, WRITTEN ON THE WIND, THE TARNISHED ANGELS, and IMITATION OF LIFE. In ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, Douglas Sirk's haunting suburban morality play, Jane Wyman plays Cary Scott, a wealthy middle-aged widow in love with a younger man considered by those around her to be far below her social standing. Her torrid affair with Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), a handsome, earthy gardener, quickly creates unbearable societal pressure for Cary. Giving in to the scathing criticism of her stodgy neighbours and her materialistic children, Cary severs contact with Ron. She then discovers--perhaps too late--that her heart cannot be so easily caged. Douglas Sirk whips up a devastating maelstrom of melodrama in WRITTEN ON THE WIND, the explosive tale of the Hadleys, a wealthy Texas oil family whose debauched members are on a crash course for self-destruction. From the windswept drunken car ride and pistol shot opening the film, Sirk leads an artful backward glance at the misjudgements, cruelty and bad faith that led the Hadleys and their unfortunate hangers-on to the point of no return. In Douglas Sirk's emotionally and visually extravagant final film IMITATION OF LIFE, a life's work of subverted melodrama and razor-sharp social commentary are brought to a resounding and baroque climax. In a role that closely resembles and perhaps parodies her own life, Lana Turner plays Lora Meredith, an aspiring actress and single mother who meets Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), a black and similarly single and struggling mother. When they move in together, Annie assumes the role of domestic servant and the two women struggle together to raise their two daughters.

Customer Reviews

Disappointing
As great as it is to have Magnificent Obsession and Tarnished Angels on DVD at last, it's disappointing to see what Universal have - or rather, haven't - done here. The cropping of MO - as detailed by the two previous reviewers - and the soft dull colours of the other films are not a pleasure to behold. Imitation of Life seems to have copied the same soft transfer as the previous Region 1 release, while the transfer of Written on the Wind is nowhere near the eye-popping sharpness of the Criterion DD from a few years back. Sadly, Criterion no longer have the rights to the Sirk films, so it looks like this is the best we're going to get... unless Universal puts some work into fresh versions for a Region 1 release.

A disaster
DVD companies take a lot of criticism, much of it justified, for finding ways to get consumers to re-purchase the same titles over and over. For example, with this box set, instead of including All I Desire, which had already been available on DVD for some time, they could have included a different Sirk film like There's Always Tomorrow. This time, however, I had nothing but good feelings about buying this set. Two of my most desired films that had not been released on DVD before, Magnificent Obsession and The Tarnished Angels, were finally coming out! But the way they botched the release of a great film like Magnificent Obsession is inexcusable.
The colors are off (everything is too pink), there is way too much visible "grain" in the transfer, and many scenes have a blurry look, probably due to improper alignment of the three separate strips of the film elements.
Worst of all, as the other reviewer already pointed out, they were way off on the aspect ratio. Back in mid-1954 when this film came out directors and cinematographers were still composing for 1.37:1, or 1.66:1 at the very widest. Sirk and Russell Metty meticulously set up each shot to show important characters, objects, and relationships between them composed in a particular way. For some reason, Universal has seen fit to retain masking to roughly 2:1 that was applied at some point after Magnificent Obsession's initial release.
If this seems like tech geekery or home-theater hair-splitting to you, imagine how different it is seeing the film reduced to a completely strange-looking state by intruding cuts way into the top and bottom boundaries of the frame, starting with the Universal logo at the beginning and continuing all the way through the film. Magnificent Obsession's careful composition of the shots to frame the important visual information is crucial to the mise-en-scene (and thus the substantial meaning of the film) and is not very forgiving of a drastic change like this.
I know this is only one film out of the box set, but as it is one of Sirk's best and this was to be its auspicious DVD debut, it really is a major disappointment. One can only hope that Universal will do a much better job if and when Magnificent Obsession is released in the U.S.

Directed by Douglas Sirk
This SHOULD have been one of the most eagerly greeted director's boxes since Sternberg or Ozu, containing as it does the bulk of Sirk's 50s work and two titles previously unavailable on DVD, Tarnished Angels and Magnificent Obsession.

Sadly Universal have cruelled the box with a transfer of Magnificent Obsession in a cropped matted format of 2.00:1. The original shooting ratio was 1.37:1(Academy) and although released in 1954 it is highly unlikely, even in the post 53 Widescreen/Scope era that Sirk and DP Russell Metty would have shot and composed it for any masking greater than 1.66:1. By 1956 Sirk and Metty were composing All that Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind to accomodate widescreen masking, in which format those titles appear in the boxset (and on the earlier Criterion DVDs.)

Unfortunately the damage done to Magnificent Obsession by this is a travesty. A carefully composed progression of design and layout leads to key 2 shots and 3 shots which are lit and structured on vertical axes to show Wyman increasingly overpowered by faces and objects after she becomes blind, for instance. These sequences are completely ruined by the masking. Similarly Rock Hudson's character developes into a man literally hiding his true identity (an underlying subtext in Sirk's work with Hudson) and the mise en scene gradually alters Hudson's dominant position in framing to a subservient one, again in vertical composition and again ruined by the 2.00 masking.

This set should have been a real prize for what it promised but unless Universal were moved to recall Magnificent Obsession and re-issue it in a correct ratio, the Collection is quite literally tarnished.