Lloyd C. Douglas utilized a lot of spiritual themes in his writing, specializing in stories of atonement. For this medical drama, something's been lost in translation in the film version, resulting in a dour, unbelievably sappy tale where every effort to eject tears from the viewer is manipulatively obvious. Ridiculous racial stereotypes and an embarrassingly passive performance by Dorothy Lamour turns this into a saccharine overdose.
John Howard is an idealistic medical student under the thumb of autocratic Akim Tamiroff whose coldness has no place in the medical profession. He believes that love and medical treatment are incompatible, so when Howard falls for the gentle Lamour, Tamiroff sabotages it in every way he can think of. This leads to Howard nearly dying and Lamour and Tamiroff at odds at Howard's bedside.
While the performances attempt to be sincere, they are destroyed quickly by a banal script, a ridiculous plot and direction that demands to have a halo on it. "Magnificent Obsession" worked because of realistic characters that the audience liked and wanted to see resolve their issues. This had me agonizing over the fact that I didn't believe for a minute that Howard would put up with Tamiroff's arrogance or Lamour's Lotus Blossom personality which had her supposedly American of birth but adopted by Chinese parents, yet made to look like Luise Rainer in "The Good Earth".
John Howard is an idealistic medical student under the thumb of autocratic Akim Tamiroff whose coldness has no place in the medical profession. He believes that love and medical treatment are incompatible, so when Howard falls for the gentle Lamour, Tamiroff sabotages it in every way he can think of. This leads to Howard nearly dying and Lamour and Tamiroff at odds at Howard's bedside.
While the performances attempt to be sincere, they are destroyed quickly by a banal script, a ridiculous plot and direction that demands to have a halo on it. "Magnificent Obsession" worked because of realistic characters that the audience liked and wanted to see resolve their issues. This had me agonizing over the fact that I didn't believe for a minute that Howard would put up with Tamiroff's arrogance or Lamour's Lotus Blossom personality which had her supposedly American of birth but adopted by Chinese parents, yet made to look like Luise Rainer in "The Good Earth".