User Reviews

In between his two DeMille blockbusters, Charlton Heston did a bunch of films of varying quality, some for Paramount and some as a loan out. For this medical soap opera, Heston went to Columbia to appear opposite Lizabeth Scott.

Bad For Each Other is kind of like Not As A Stranger in reverse. If you'll recall in that one Robert Mitchum had nurse/wife Olivia DeHavilland, but had a roving eye for the sultry socialite Gloria Grahame. In this one Heston starts out going big time for Scott, but there is also idealistic nurse Dianne Foster in the picture as well.

Heston's character is an army doctor on leave, fresh from Korea and in Coalville, Pennsylvania to visit his mother, Mildred Dunnock. He gets a nice offer from the town doctor Rhys Williams to move in and gradually takeover his practice. But when Scott comes with a better offer in more attractive packaging, Heston's libido takes over and he leaves the army to work in a high priced clinic for the rich and powerful in Pittsburgh.

It's not just hormones talking here, the only thing about Coalville Heston liked as a kid was saying goodbye to it as he didn't want to wind up in the mines like most of the town.

There's a cave-in at the mine for a climax and I think if you've seen enough medical dramas you have some idea where this is going. The stars and supporting cast are all comfortable in the parts they are playing, but no new ground is broken in Bad For Each Other.

Usually my rating comes pretty close to the "group" rating here. But this time I must disagree and give this film a considerably higher "7".

I was not expecting much, partially because since Charlton Heston's NRA rants he had fallen out of favor with me, although I still believe his performance in Ben-Hur was one of the great performances in cinematic history. But there have been few other films I really enjoyed him in. But, Heston's performance here is top notch

As one other reviewer here pointed out, it isn't far into the film before we know that the basic plot is that a doctor who is tempted to a rich practice for hypochondriacs will, eventually, return to his true calling. Okay, but then again, we figure out the gist of most movies pretty quickly. What makes a film interesting is the way it gets to a conclusion we've already figured out.

On the one hand, some aspects of the story -- such as the coal mining aspect -- are a little different. There are also some aspects of the film that just don't ring true...such as the mother's reluctance to have her son be successful; that is a bit overdone. And, I don't think the screenwriters did Lizabeth Scott's role any favors; she's too callous. But, at least she's interesting here. Dianne Foster as a dedicated nurse was good, and it's always nice to see Mildred Dunnock (here as the mother; too bad the role was not more realistic). Arthur Franz is excellent as a dedicated young doctor. It's always a plus to have veteran character actor Ray Collins in a film, and he is wonderful as ever here. Same for Marjorie Rambeau as a rich, matronly type. Lester Matthews and Rhys Williams do fine as a slick city-type doctor versus a country doctor.

So, from my perspective, this is a pretty decent movie. Perhaps not one for the DVD shelf, but definitely worth a watch (or two...as I did).

This film finds Charlton Heston a career military doctor. He's a colonel and has come home on leave. However, two things make him reassess whether to continue in this military career--his deceased brother and Lizabeth Scott. As for the brother, he too had grown up in this Pennsylvania coal town but living the high life was so important that he created a lot of debts and died owing a lot of people. Heston felt an obligation to pay off these debts. The other reason was the odd character played by Lizabeth Scott. She plays a very sophisticated but highly controlling woman--twice divorced. Shortly after meeting Heston, she decided to make him into the man she wanted him to be--in a swanky private practice and with his manhood under her firm control! Considering how obviously manipulative and controlling she is, it seems amazing that Heston would be interested in her...though in real life I've seen people make similar insane decisions with who they marry. It seems obvious to everyone EXCEPT Heston that she's just no good--a woman who will crush his spirit and emasculate him. At the same time, Heston's new assistant has a lot going for her--quite the looker and very sweet (Dianne Foster). How he could fall for Scott is sure a puzzler and you're rooting for him to wake up and notice Foster! You just wonder if she'd have him now that he's so focused on monetary success.

So does everything work out fine for Charlton? Well, if it did, then there'd be no reason for this film! First, while this other doc was great with schmoozing and putting on an image that the rich folks loved, he was incompetent. Naturally, this had a big impact on Heston--how could he continue a partnership with this man--especially when the guy wasn't at all repentant about his lack of skills. As for Scott, she's everything you assume she is--an albatross around Charlton's neck! But, when Heston is called to the nearby coal mine when there's a cave-in, his moment of decision is at hand.

Overall, a very good film though I think they made Scott too obviously selfish and annoying. Had they toned her down just a bit, it would have improved the film and made it not quite so obvious. I also felt a bit annoyed that the film seemed to imply that being a "society doctor" is a bad thing is a bit of an overstatement. They seem to be saying that Heston should "stick with his own social class" as well as promotes the myth that rich folks are all hypochondriacs. Not all rich people are bad and not all poor folks are noble! As for me, I say good for Heston if he's able to make a go of this practice after spending so many years in the service! After all, SOMEBODY needs to treat rich people! Also, I found it interesting that Scott was used in the film as she really did grow up in the region featured in the film! This Scranton-born girl didn't have to stretch very far in the accent department!

Most of the other comments on this tale have been pretty much on the mark. It's a "medical soap opera." And it's a permutation of "Not As a Stranger." After twelve years in the Army, Chuck Heston is a full colonel in the Medical Corps who returns for a visit to his home town of Coalville, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh. It's a shabby mining town full of poor laborers and the only doctor in Rhys Williams who doesn't earn enough to own a private jet that can fly him to Cancun for a winter tan.

Chuck is disgusted by the place. But when he meets a society doctor, Lester Mathews, in Pittsburgh, and especially when he meets the husky-voiced Lizabeth Scott, daughter of the man who owns the mines in Coalville, he's seduced into leaving the Army, working as an associate for Doctor Croesus in Pittsburgh, and becoming engaged to the enormously wealthy but self-indulgent Scott.

Soon he has just about everything he wants, including an extremely efficient and highly educated nurse, Dianne Foster, who is given to needling him for becoming Mathews' "ghost surgeon" and for treating adjustment disorders of the rich instead of the suppurating illnesses of the poor minors in Coalville.

There's been criticism of the social structure painted in this film -- nothing but the hypochondriacal wealthy who come only to flirt with the glamorous doc, versus the smudged minors and their families who REALLY get sick. And it DOES seem a little like propaganda because, after all, the rich get sick just like the poor. Yet, we should remember that the wealthy can afford to get treatment for less threatening disorders like headaches, while the uninsured poor are liable to lug themselves to a doc only when their bones are broken. Ergo: A disproportionate number of rich patients with minor complaints, with a disproportionate number of poor people with life-threatening disorders.

There are a couple of sub-plots involving an idealistic young colleague of Chuck's, Arthur Franz; another about Chuck's brother having been miscreant; and something about a mysterious shadow that shows up on the lungs of miners in Essen, Germany, and Coalville, Pennsylvania. The lung disease business is dropped. The Franz thread leads to a payoff in which Chuck throws away his financial security and goes back to do the work every semi-sophisticated viewer always knew he would do. He gives up the clinging and demanding Liz Scott too, and the last shot is of Chuck and his efficient nurse in his Coalville office, staring starry-eyed at one another. I admired both characters, not because they turned out to be good but because they were both educated at the University of Pennsylvania where I too had some classes.

This was written by Horace McCoy, whose novel, "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?", was a study in despair and that was later turned into a decent exploration of human endurance. I've never read the novel but you'd never know McCoy was a good writer if you judged his talent on the basis of this film alone.

Chuck's status is in-your-face emphatic. Everybody calls him "Colonel" and then everybody calls him "doctor." Doctors call each other "doctor", even in casual conversation. The doctors call friends by their nicknames and subordinates by their last names. Chuck's nurse is "Lasher", not "Joan." I counted, and the word "doctor" is used exactly eleven-thousand, four-hundred and three times. It recalls the old joke: What's the difference between God and a doctor? God doesn't think he's a doctor. That, in turn, reminds me of another old joke: What's the difference between a vitamin and a hormone? You can make a vitamin. Yes, it's a long road that has no turning. I don't know what that means but it sounds awfully proverbial to me.

Now, we return to our movie. What was it again? Yes, that's right. Nurse, hand me a fresh Ostwald viscometer, will you? Lizabeth Scott is urging Chuck to accept a partnership with Mathews. By this time Mathews has been exposed as a kind of suave but incompetent front man and Chuck is treating the long line of society matrons waiting to have a swelling excised from their wallets. Foster is urging him to rediscover his idealism. He plumps for the dough until a mine explosion reeducates and revitalizes him, after which he leaves Liz Scott for sooty Coalville.

Chuck seems to have been finding his feet when he made this. Some of his movements seem awkward and strained, though he's a magnetic presence on the screen. Being ten feet tall and sounding like Ezio Pinza helps. Liz Scott delivers a standard Hollywood performance. When she has something Big to import, she stands slightly bent at the waist, her elbows crooked at her side. Her acting is as shallow as her character. Only God, my dear, could love you for yourself alone and not your yellow hair. I've never seen a man adopt such a stance, and women only do it in the movies. Dianne Foster uses it too, so it must be mere convention. I give Foster a pass on it, though, because she's so bright eyed and so supportive of Chuck as he wrestles with these conflicts. Also Foster's voice doesn't sound as if it had been subjected to half a lifetime of being cured by the smoke of Gaulois. It sort of tinkles.

At heart, this is a dumb and obvious movie, yet I kind of enjoyed it. There's a lot of talk, true, but the plot is so simple as to fall just short of simple mindedness. You already KNOW what's going to happen. A good man, led astray, will be saved through the sacrifice of another and the love of a good woman. Soothing and palliative, your troubles melt away.

This Columbia film is an abbreviated reworking of MGM's THE CITADEL (1938). In THE CITADEL a young doctor treats miners in Wales, but then sells out to treat rich hypochondriacs in London, before rediscovering his ethics in the end. In BAD FOR EACH OTHER, it's miners in Coalville vs. rich women in Pittsburgh. There are many other similarities, although BAD reshuffles the plot elements into a shorter running time. A mine disaster sequence, common to both films, is egregiously duplicated in BAD, including some shots which are near-identical. It's close to plagiarism. THE CITADEL is a great film, while BAD is merely entertaining. Just don't watch them within a month of each other, as I accidentally did.

This was a good movie, that didn't get either preachy or overly dramatic, which could easily have happened. Charlton Heston played the role of Tom Owen with the right amount of low-key intensity, convincing as the army colonel/doctor who returns to his Pennsylvania mining town after the Korean War and chooses the lucrative life of a Pittsburgh society doctor, rather than work where his skills are needed badly, like with the mine workers.

Lizabeth Scott is Helen Curtis, the socialite he falls for, whose father owns the mine where tom's late brother, Floyd worked, and unfortunately did a corrupt job, more concerned with money and the lifestyle his marriage to a rich woman gave him, than the health and safety of the miners. Though disapproving of his brother's actions, he more or less follows in his footsteps, putting ambition above all else, and planning to marry helen.

Dianne Foster plays the other woman in his life, Joan Lasher, who works as his nurse, aspires to be a doctor, and tries to encourage him to live up to his full potential as a physician, and not settle for treating wealthy, self-centered hypochondriacs, with too much time and money, just so he can join the ranks of the privileged few.

The title refers to Helen's not-so-good influence on Tom, as medical ethics come into play, a young idealistic doctor is shown in contrast to Tom, and a tragedy at the mine brings clarity.

The movie could have been longer, with more contrast between Helen and Joan emphasized, as well as more indication that Tom and Joan could have more between them than work. Also, a potential health crisis involving the mine workers is mentioned, then interrupted and not picked up again. This could have been made into a good turning point in the story, but the potential was wasted.

A good movie but could have been a tad better.

Before watching this movie, I bethought myself, with Charlton Heston, Liz Scott, and Ray Collins, presented in early '50's beautiful black and white, it can't be all bad. How wrong I was. Bad for Each other was just bad for viewing. The cinematography was gorgeous, all right, and the cast was good, all right, but both were wasted on this movie.

I will not waste time on the plot. Too much ink has already been spilled going over its standard "The Citadel" pattern doctor-torn-between-being- noble-helper-of-mankind-and-making-money story line. It has been used over and over again because it works well. In Hollywood when they found a horse that would run, they just went ahead and rode him to death. And that's not so bad. But this was a very poor treatment of the familiar story.

The development of the story was incompetent and contrived. The story had so many plot threads, it would have taken a two and a half hour movie to cover them all, but this second feature programmer was only 84 minutes. We were led to expect that the X-rays of the miners' lungs displaying some hard-to-diagnose disease, shown to Dr. Heston by both the old coal mine doctor (Rhys Williams) and his idealistic young assistant (Arthor Franz) would turn out important in the denouement. Likewise the issue of whether Heston's character intended to pay off his late brother's debts. But there was no payoff on either. Both were left hanging at the end. People, including her own father, kept telling Heston how bad spoiled society dame Liz Scott had been for all men and how she would ruin him. But he seemed to be developing all of his bad attitude on his own without her help. Her attempts to manipulate him had little effect. In fact he seemed to dominate her.

The characterization in general was very bad. The noble poor -- Heston's mother (Mildred Dunnock), the dedicated nurse (Dianne Foster), and Franz's idealistic young doctor -- all came off like doctrinaire commie stereotypes. All of the rich people were likewise portrayed like socialist models of capitalistic pigs, the exception being Ray Collins' mine owner, who showed a little troubled noblesse oblige. I'm not suggesting it was made from a socialist point of view. I'm not sure the movie even had a point of view. It was just crude. If the commies couldn't do any better than that in the propaganda department, no wonder they lost the Cold War!

The cruelest disappoint of all awaited us Liz Scott fans. What a waste of that dynamite figure, that wicked, toothy leer, those vampire eyes, and that awesome ability to be bad,bad, bad! So bad that in another, much better, movie Too Late for Tears she even made Dan Duryea look like a half -decent guy by comparison! She never got to be really bad in this movie, just a bit spoiled and selfish. I kept waiting for her to shoot someone, poison someone, double-cross someone, or just run off with the plumber. Any of the above would have considerably improved this movie. Unfortunately nothing so interesting happened.

No, Liz wasn't bad, but Bad for Each Other was.

He's close enough to where mother Mildred Dunnock lives, but somehow doctor Charlton Heston, recently discharged from the army, ends up as pill pusher for a bunch of society matrons and plaything for bored wealthy divorcee Lizabeth Scott whose narcissistic demeanor threatens to destroy him. Somehow this melodramatic soap opera gets off the track of its initial agenda, dealing with Heston's late brother whose actions were responsible for death in a coal mine nearby.

Although it's established that he hasn't been home in over a decade, somehow Heston is blamed for his brother's actions, but that important plot point is forgotten the moment he ends up in Scott's web. Ray Collins plays Scott's father who warns Heston about his daughter, and while he has some great points, Heston completely ignores him, making this the biggest dolt of a doctor ever presented in the movies.

Blame the rambling script for this film's mediocrity, entertaining but definitely unbelievable and misguided as to where its focus should be. Arthur Franz, Marjorie Rambeau and Dianne Foster co-star, with Foster a much more desirable match for Heston than Scott's character, even though Scott's vixen is a delightful femme fatale. Certainly fun to be around as long as it doesn't cross the line. This is basically a ripoff of the type of film producer Ross Hunter and director Douglas Sirk were making throughout the 50's, but not nearly as well thought out. Somewhat saved by an explosion at the mine, but it's still hard to believe that the snobs Heston treats would live as close to it as they do.

This ho-hum drama directed by Irving Rapper has a young doctor torn between money and deep down dedication. Dr. Tom Owen(Charlton Heston)is a Korean War veteran that returns to his hometown, a Pennsylvania coal mining community. After meeting a spoiled, rich daddy's girl, Helen Curtis(Lizabeth Scott), Owen will have to decide between treating wealthy women with imaginary ailments; or remain being a small down doc tending the poor and indigent. To make Owen's situation more complex is a pretty, idealistic nurse, Dianne Foster(Joan Lasher). It doesn't take very long to figure where this story leads. Other players include: Ray Collins, Rhys Williams, Arthur Franz, Lester Matthews and Mildred Dunnock.

With Charlton Heston and Lizabeth Scott heading up the cast od "Bad For Each Other", I expected more. It was presented as a film noir by Columbia Pictures, but it is not. What it is is a slow moving life among the rich and elite drama.

Heston plays Dr. Tom Owen, an army Colonel who is returning to his hometown of Coalville, Pennsylvania on leave. He goes home where he tries to console his mother (Mildred Dunnock) over the recent death of his brother. Later, as he walks through town, a burly miner Pete Olzonski (Chris Alcaide) socks him on the jaw over Tom's brother's mismanagement of mine safety that had caused an accident at the mine. Tom visits local doctor SCobee (Rhys Williams) who offers him a job once he leaves the service. Not wanting to remain in his dusty coal town, he decides to stay in the service.

Tom decides against his mother's objections to seek out mine owner Reasonover (Ray Collins) to find out what really happened. Tom learns that his brother had been caught up in the society life style and had embezzeled company funds and had skimmed off funds intended for safety equipment. At that meeting at a society party, Tom meets Reasonover's twice divorced daughter Helen Curtis (Lizabeth Scott). She sets her sights on Tom. When a party guest attempts suicide, Tom steps in and treats her, impressing the rich and elite present. Helen sets yup a meeting with socialite Doctor Gleeson (Lester Mathews) who offers him an associate job with his firm. Wanting only the best in life, Tom accepts.

An old acquaintance from his army days the now Dr. Jim Crowley (Arthur Franz) pays Tom a visit asking for a job. Tom decides to send him to Coalville and Dr. Scobee. Tom's recently hired nurse, the efficient Joan Lasher (Dianne Foster) takes a liking to Crowley. Meanwhile, Helen and Tom become engaged. Her father cautions against a marriage to his spoiled rich daughter. Tom doesn't listen. Helen's aunt, Mrs. Nelson (Marjory Rambeau) takes ill and requires an operation. Dr. Gleeson is unable to perform the surgery and has Tom do it for him. For this, Tom is offered a partnership which would mean riches beyond his wildest dreams. Joan is not impressed with Tom's ethics and quits him going to Coalville to join Crowley.

Tom is quire happy living the life of a socialite until he receives an urgent phone call from his mother informing him of a cave in at the mine. Tom comes to his senses and breaks off the engagement with Helen when she refuses to go with him to Coalville. Tom rushes to the mine where Crowley and Joan are trying to free trapped miners including Olzoneski. Tom joins them but........................................................................................

Heston basically sleepwalks through his role as the ambitious doctor and Scott, whose best days were behind her, is anything but the expected femme fatale here. Franz is essentially Tom Owens' conscience as the dedicated all for medicine small town doctor. Mildred Dunnock is the best thing in this film as the distraught mother. Foster looks lovely but has little to do other than be Owen's other conscience.

I'm sure that both Heston and Scott hadn't considered this film as one of their favorites.