Everything came together—the advent of widescreen filmmaking, a star-making performance from Rock Hudson, and a story so far-fetched it was practically begging for Sirk’s Brechtian approach—in the first of the director’s extraordinary Technicolor melodramas. Hudson is a devil-may-care playboy who inadvertently widows and then blinds the local doctor’s wife (Jane Wyman), before giving up his reckless ways to become a surgeon in hopes that he might cure her. Through his command of color, composition, and mise-en-scène, Sirk transforms this most outré of premises into a luminous, metaphysical exploration of fate and spirituality.