MUBI

Beneath the blindness, the boat crash, the deaths and near deaths, and all the raging melodrama and narrative ridiculousness, the light of the Ideal glows and glows until it permeates the screen like the gorgeous technicolor landscapes that never change.

Rock Hudson’s teeth and perma-tan are also part of these landscapes, never varying through the many lifetimes of emotional tumultuousness he undergoes in 109 minutes.

The surface is never less than stunning, and never marred – Jane Wyman actually looks more attractive blind, and yet more attractive bandaged and blind, and the change of every season is represented as some ideal, ever changing and ever perfect – but beneath the beauty, and beneath the triteness and absurdity of the script, is constantly welling emotion, gargantuan emotion that mutates the garishness into something terribly moving.

And to top it all is a running theme of occult and unseen powers. Wyman’s husband is never seen, though the occult powers he conjured by giving all his money away permeate the film, are actually the guiding force of the narrative.

I also suspect there are deeper significances associated with the film beginning on and near water and ending in the desert – to represent the passage of spiritual transformation perhaps, the aridness of the desert representing ultimate wisdom. And in this lovely desert the film ends on a mysterious note, with Hudson’s painter friend gazing at his work well done then walking off and away, as if his role of guiding spirit was over and so it was time for him to return to the ideal source.