Radio review – Lux – “Magnificent Obssession” (1937) **

I’m surprised this novel hasn’t been refilmed during the last fifty years, despite it’s creakiness since it has such an excellent record with launching pretty boy male stars – film versions of it were big milestones in the careers of Robert Taylor and Rock Hudson. This radio adaptation has Taylor and Irene Dunne reprising their film roles. Taylor is actually pretty good – his strong voice was ideal for radio, and Dunne is solid. (She even sings a song at the end from the film High, Wide and Handsome!)

 

The story is hokey – Taylor’s a playboy who is injured – they’re too busy fixing him so they can’t save a useful doctor, who’s having a heart attack. It’s not his fault. Not his fault either that Taylor romances Dunne and takes her for a drive – she storms out of the car and gets run over (and is blinded). But he feels guilty enough to want to become a doctor. He pretends to be someone else around her, they fall in love, he cures her. Awww…

 

Easy to mock but it still holds – there’s also a great moral (something with prompted author Lloyd C Douglas, who speaks during the interval, to write it in the first place) of the importance of doing good anonymously: paying it forward, as it were. The opening introductory spiel talks about how Deanna Durbin, even though only 13, recognises the importance of using Lux soap - so the whole tween market isn't an entirely new phenomenon.