It isn’t enough to have a brain you have to have a heart. Ambitious medical student Lucas Marsh (Robert Mitchum) aspires to being a doctor with his own practice. Unable to fund his studies himself, he woos the warm, supportive nurse Kristina (Olivia de Havilland) a Minnesotan Swede, an unlikely mate except it is she who has the financial resources he needs for him to realise his dreams. The couple marries and moves to the small town of Greenville, where Lucas works as an assistant to Dr. Runkleman (Charles Bickford). However, after a series of betrayals, having an affair with local widow (Gloria Grahame) and unaware Kristina is expecting their child, Lucas is forced to face life without the help of others … Gentlemen, this is a corpse! This adaptation by Edna Anhalt and Edward Anhalt of Morton Thompson’s 1954 bestseller is notable on several fronts: the directing debut of producer Stanley Kramer; the comeback of sorts of de Havilland who had decamped to France following her marriage to Pierre Galante, executive editor of Paris Match; and her appearance as a blonde; as well as the pairing of Sinatra and Mitchum, surely two disparate if not opposites of midcentury masculinity with Mitchum giving one of his worst performances; and Grahame as effectively the polar opposite of de Havilland, seemingly existing only in the realm of the sensual, from horseback riding to pouting and smouldering incessantly with that surgically botched and quivering upper lip. De Havilland is first compared with Ava Gardner when she and Mitchum walk out of The Barefoot Contessa at the cinema and she looks positively matronly in the role. It’s a film of peculiarly shifting tones, from the horrible surgery scenes (and this is the first film to feature a closeup of a beating heart), the montages of patients at the smalltown medical office, the awkward collegiate sequences including Lee Marvin (with an odd wig) as a fellow student and the sheer weirdness between Mitchum and Lon Chaney as his alcoholic father. Naturally, there’s a moral lesson here in terms of the Godlike position of certain doctors and the others who aren’t as familiar with the texts but who muck along just nicely until they let a typhoid case go unheeded. The thing that kills me about idealists is just how far you go, chides Sinatra as Alfred. And, Sometimes I wish I had 75 more pounds. I’d belt you one! How Mitchum shoulders his superiority and ultimately is forced to confront his Achilles heel and emotional unavailability is the whole thing and he doesn’t handle it well either in performance or character despite the three contrasting role models for a father, his actual father and then his medical mentors. And then, the inevitable. God help him – he made a mistake
mondomovies 