User Reviews

I have read the novel "Not as a stranger" several times, and I love it a lot. Therefore, I had high expectations on this movie. What I saw, justified my expectations just partly. The good thing was, that the script followed the book surprisingly well, for being made in the 1950:s.

But at the same time, they had changed some things unnecessarily. For example, Luke, Mitchum's character, did not at all operate on his boss the country doctor in the end. Instead the doctor, knowing himself that he was soon going to die, left his practice and went on a cruise... The ending in the movie was only unnecessarily dramatic, unrealistic, and contrived.

I also miss the scene where a person had gone astray in the forest, and Luke took part in the search party. The things that were thought and said in this scene in the novel, were very beautiful and full of insight and necessary to the understanding of the story as a whole. I cannot understand why it was not included in the movie..? The episode about the old man, that Luke saved by working the night through, is also a little wrong. In the novel, the hospital doctor had not only neglected his care, but even tried to hasten his death by placing him in an unheated room with an open window...

But apart from these things, I think the movie gave a fairly good rendering of the story. There is one more thing I have to object to, though: the casting. I like Robert Mitchum a lot - I think he was very sexy. A typical alpha male! :-) ...but he was not at all right in this role, about a sensitive, intelligent and intellectual young man.

The same is true for Olivia de Havilland: I like her a lot in many other movies, for example "Gone with the Wind". But she was not right as a Swedish woman (and me BEING a Swedish woman should know! :-) ). Her hair is so obviously bleached into an unnatural blond hair color, that does not go with her eyes or skin. Her - and her female Minnesota friend's - accents, are not Swedish either. Another thing that is very wrong, is that Kristina is supposed to be big, cow-like an ugly (something which is NOT, by the way, typical of Swedish women! :-) ). That was an important part of the story: that Luke only married her for her money. But Havilland is of course VERY beautiful in this movie, as always, so the idea of someone marrying her only for her money gets completely ridiculous...

The worst thing about the casting, though, is that both Mitchum, Sinatra and de Havilland are much too old for their parts in the beginning of the movie. I cannot understand how the people responsible for the casting were thinking..? Apart from these flaws, though, it is a beautiful, interesting and thought-provoking movie, well worth watching!

There are some problems with this film, but overall I liked it.

Problem # 1: Olivia deHavilland was 39 years old when this film was made, but the part was of a 20-something young lady. She's still lovely and almost pulls it off, but when you think that GWTW was 16 years earlier...well, that kinda stuck in my mind. And, BTW, just why did she have to have a Swedish accent??? Nevertheless, deHavilland is a superb actress, and when you put her age out of the equation, her acting is -- as always -- excellent.

Problem # 2: Frank Sinatra became quite a good actor, but in my view that potential doesn't show through here. He is totally unconvincing as a med student and future doctor, although later in the film he seems to be more comfortable in the role.

Problem # 3: What did directors see in Gloria Grahame? The first half of this film follows the two med students -- Robert Mitchum and Frank Sinatra -- through medical school. Mitchum can't afford medical school, in part because his father (Lon Chaney, Jr.) is a drunk and has squandered all his money. So, Mitchum marries a sweet girl (Olivia deHavilland) for her limited savings.

The second half of the film follows Mitchum into practice in a small city. Here, another solid performance by a veteran character actor -- Charles Bickford as the local doctor -- adds to the stature of the film. This part of the story revolves around Mitchum's floundering to discover his own strengths as a man, which is only resolved when he finally fails -- attempting to save his mentor (Bickford). Unfortunately, he gets sidelined along the way with an affair with an almost laughable Gloria Grahame sham of a role.

The most interesting surprise in this film is the outstanding performance by Broderick Crawford. Crawford as a Dr. Gillespie type? It seemed like such as odd role for Crawford, but he excels in it! To be honest, it surprised me at how effective Robert Mitchum was in the male lead, here (although he took second billing to DeHavilland). Lon Chaney, Jr. was effective as the alcoholic father, unfortunately apparently type casting. You'll also see Jesse White, Harry Morgan, and Lee Marvin in minor roles.

I think this is quite a good film, and I'm surprised at how little known it is today. Recommended at least once...and maybe even for your DVD shelf.

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.

Despite miscasting of Mitchum and Sinatra as rather superannuated medical students the film taken from the Morton novel and slightly changed is fun to watch. Mitchum played his usual strong silent type character. No one ever accused him of overacting or even acting. What made the movie enjoyable were the strong performances of the rest of the cast Crawford, Bickford, deHavilland, sporting a ridiculous hairdo, and the very sexy Gloria Grahame. There is a very heavy handed but funny scene where a stallion is loosed to have his way with a mare in season before Mitchum and Gloria consummate their affair. Surpringly this scene was expunged from a recent TCM showing. All in all worth watching.