Strictly a product of 1950s Hollywood, a soap opera in a medical setting, with Robert Mitchum, of all people, as a perfectionist doctor, directed by a man whose relationship to a film's message is that of the backhoe to the graveyard sward. Is that unpromising, or what? Yet it works rather well. We watch Mitchum and Frank Sinatra slog their way through medical school and internships, with people like Jerry Paris and Lee Marvin as fellow novices. Mitchum's problem is that he's acknowledged as a brilliant student but he can't afford his tuition.
I'll try to keep this short. He marries a plain, squarehead operating room nurse, Olivia De Havilland, for her money, promising himself and Sinatra that, although he doesn't love De Havilland, "she'll never know it." I kept thinking what a fine Kirk Douglas role this was. By the way, OR nurses do rather well financially. Mitchum makes a wise choice if what he wants is pelf. I wonder if any single OR nurses are reading this. If so, I can be reached through a PM. I'm a fine prospective husband. True, I have four divorces behind me but I'm very witty and gay, especially when drunk. The extortion charges were the result of the DA's vendetta and they didn't stick.
Lost the thread of things there. Yes, so the marriage to this extravagantly blond but plain-looking nurse gets Mitchum through school, then he and his wife set up a practice in a small town under the benevolent imprimatur of elderly Dr. Runkleman, Charles Bickford. De Havilland assumes the role of housewife and Mitchum buries himself in his work. One night he comes home from the office and flops exhausted on the couch. "Liuke," she murmurs in her Scandinavian accent, "I ban thinking' about havin' a family, yew know?" But Luke has fallen asleep. And that's the situation. Mitchum and De Havilland unhappily established in their small town, with Bickford as their close friend and occasional visits to and from Sinatra. We see patients of various kinds and watch the docs fight a typhoid epidemic. Mitchum happily devotes himself to saving lives, even if it means alienating the hospital Caliphate, but he's bored at home.
At about this point I began wondering, "Where's the other woman?" Then Mitchum makes a house call at the big house of Harriet Lang, Gloria Grahame, than whom no woman is more "other". In a hilarious scene, at night under a floodlight, he sees her at the door to the stall of a stallion that is aroused by an attractive mare clipping, as they say, in a nearby field. The stallion is snorting and kicking and nearly berserk with horniness. Mitchum strides, in his Mitchumesque way, to the stall, flings open the door, the stallion lunges forth to do his business, and Mitchum sweeps Grahame up in his arms and smothers her with kisses. Fade to a crackling fire, a tumultuous thunderstorm, ocean waves smashing against jutting rocks, and the ejaculatory eruption of Mount Popocatepetl. Well, Stanley Kramer might as well have.
I've kind of made fun of the movie but it's really not bad. Mitchum is a little old for the part of a medical student but so are Sinatra and the other students. Other than that, he is mostly Robert Mitchum. He even wears a trench coat over his scrubs. But there are some moments in which he acts effectively. I direct your attention to the scene in which he's performing emergency surgery on his old friend, Charles Bickford, and screws it up so Bickford expires on the table. (We actually see a heart beating in an open chest, one of several firsts for a commercial movie like this.) Mitchum desperately massages the heart. We hear the squeaking of his surgical gloves against the tough cardiac muscle. But Bickford remains dead and Mitchum is able to project genuine anguish, even with most of his face masked, only his eyes and brows visible. The guy had talent, when he chose to exercise it.
It's a soap opera, yes, but one of the reasons is so engaging is that about half the movie tells the audience things that in the 1950s weren't so well known. Doctors split fees. Doctors make mistakes. Some doctors are barely competent. A doctor does not criticize another doctor in front of non-doctors.
There's a vas deferens between doctors and nurses. The former are always addressed as "doctor," whereas they address subordinates by their last names. ("You did a good job, Felton." "Thank you, doctor.") There are several reasons for their special status, entirely aside from the monumental amount of money they make. They have power over life and death, of a sort. They deal in the sacred. That's one of the reasons they tend not to criticize one another in public settings. The social borders are like the Great Wall of China. You're either one of us or not. That's true of other awe-inspiring professions as well: police officers, airline pilots. Airline captains dread the words "pilot error." For the police, an accidental shooting becomes "a natural reaction." When you are in a position to kill someone by mistake, the last thing you want to admit (and the last thing the public wants to know) is that a mistake can take place. Mitchum's acceptance of his own imperfection is the event that inspires his return to De Havilland.
Anyway, I found the film interesting throughout, both the soap opera and the medical themes, and at times kind of moving.
I'll try to keep this short. He marries a plain, squarehead operating room nurse, Olivia De Havilland, for her money, promising himself and Sinatra that, although he doesn't love De Havilland, "she'll never know it." I kept thinking what a fine Kirk Douglas role this was. By the way, OR nurses do rather well financially. Mitchum makes a wise choice if what he wants is pelf. I wonder if any single OR nurses are reading this. If so, I can be reached through a PM. I'm a fine prospective husband. True, I have four divorces behind me but I'm very witty and gay, especially when drunk. The extortion charges were the result of the DA's vendetta and they didn't stick.
Lost the thread of things there. Yes, so the marriage to this extravagantly blond but plain-looking nurse gets Mitchum through school, then he and his wife set up a practice in a small town under the benevolent imprimatur of elderly Dr. Runkleman, Charles Bickford. De Havilland assumes the role of housewife and Mitchum buries himself in his work. One night he comes home from the office and flops exhausted on the couch. "Liuke," she murmurs in her Scandinavian accent, "I ban thinking' about havin' a family, yew know?" But Luke has fallen asleep. And that's the situation. Mitchum and De Havilland unhappily established in their small town, with Bickford as their close friend and occasional visits to and from Sinatra. We see patients of various kinds and watch the docs fight a typhoid epidemic. Mitchum happily devotes himself to saving lives, even if it means alienating the hospital Caliphate, but he's bored at home.
At about this point I began wondering, "Where's the other woman?" Then Mitchum makes a house call at the big house of Harriet Lang, Gloria Grahame, than whom no woman is more "other". In a hilarious scene, at night under a floodlight, he sees her at the door to the stall of a stallion that is aroused by an attractive mare clipping, as they say, in a nearby field. The stallion is snorting and kicking and nearly berserk with horniness. Mitchum strides, in his Mitchumesque way, to the stall, flings open the door, the stallion lunges forth to do his business, and Mitchum sweeps Grahame up in his arms and smothers her with kisses. Fade to a crackling fire, a tumultuous thunderstorm, ocean waves smashing against jutting rocks, and the ejaculatory eruption of Mount Popocatepetl. Well, Stanley Kramer might as well have.
I've kind of made fun of the movie but it's really not bad. Mitchum is a little old for the part of a medical student but so are Sinatra and the other students. Other than that, he is mostly Robert Mitchum. He even wears a trench coat over his scrubs. But there are some moments in which he acts effectively. I direct your attention to the scene in which he's performing emergency surgery on his old friend, Charles Bickford, and screws it up so Bickford expires on the table. (We actually see a heart beating in an open chest, one of several firsts for a commercial movie like this.) Mitchum desperately massages the heart. We hear the squeaking of his surgical gloves against the tough cardiac muscle. But Bickford remains dead and Mitchum is able to project genuine anguish, even with most of his face masked, only his eyes and brows visible. The guy had talent, when he chose to exercise it.
It's a soap opera, yes, but one of the reasons is so engaging is that about half the movie tells the audience things that in the 1950s weren't so well known. Doctors split fees. Doctors make mistakes. Some doctors are barely competent. A doctor does not criticize another doctor in front of non-doctors.
There's a vas deferens between doctors and nurses. The former are always addressed as "doctor," whereas they address subordinates by their last names. ("You did a good job, Felton." "Thank you, doctor.") There are several reasons for their special status, entirely aside from the monumental amount of money they make. They have power over life and death, of a sort. They deal in the sacred. That's one of the reasons they tend not to criticize one another in public settings. The social borders are like the Great Wall of China. You're either one of us or not. That's true of other awe-inspiring professions as well: police officers, airline pilots. Airline captains dread the words "pilot error." For the police, an accidental shooting becomes "a natural reaction." When you are in a position to kill someone by mistake, the last thing you want to admit (and the last thing the public wants to know) is that a mistake can take place. Mitchum's acceptance of his own imperfection is the event that inspires his return to De Havilland.
Anyway, I found the film interesting throughout, both the soap opera and the medical themes, and at times kind of moving.