Calling Dr. Gillespie

PHILIP DORN steps in for LEW AYRES who had been the chief doctor at Blair General Hospital in a series of Dr. Kildare movies. Here Dorn is the new doctor assisting Dr. Gillepsie in a search for a serial killer who is committing crimes within the confines of the hospital posing as a doctor.

Definitely one of the better in MGM's series of B-movies with LIONEL BARRYMORE doing his gruff stuff as the blustery Dr. Gillespie and ably supported by the usual staff members at the hospital. The last half-hour moves swiftly toward a predictable but interesting climax. Comic relief is supplied by Nat Pendleton as a husky assistant prone to fainting spells.

DONNA REED does nicely as the girlfriend of the killer and if you look closely you'll spot AVA GARDNER getting some exposure in an early role. Sensitive looking Phil Brown makes an interesting homicidal maniac and in some scenes bears a startling resemblance to--of all people--Lew Ayres.

Summing up: Nice little B-melodrama from Metro.

Calling Dr. Gillespie, the first film made with Lionel Barrymore now in the lead of the medical series that had previously featured Lew Ayres as Dr. Kildare takes a really sharp turn into a film noir melodrama as Barrymore becomes the target of a homicidal maniac.

The case comes to Barrymore's attention after a young man who Donna Reed was about to marry flips out and kills her dog. He brings in as a consultant a refugee doctor from Europe Phillip Dorn who is a surgeon, but wants to change his specialty to psychiatry. I guess there were no psychiatrists available.

But between them Dorn and Barrymore come to the conclusion that young Philip Brown is insane and belongs in a hospital. A conclusion that the family physician, stuffy Charles Dingle doesn't agree with.

This film is also unusual because there is a whole interlude where Brown takes center stage and the Blair General regulars completely disappear from the film for a while. Brown flees to Detroit where he proves Barrymore right and Dingle wrong when he commits a couple of murders for reasons that only would make sense to an insane man.

The dynamic of the series shifted with this film and not only because Lew Ayres departed. Ayres was the young protégé to Barrymore and it was a medical father/son dynamic then. Here Lionel Barrymore has a very professional assistant in Dorn and he's not quite the curmudgeon towards him as he was with Ayres.

The rest of the Blair General regulars were there, Walter Kingsford as the head of the hospital, Alma Kruger as head of the nurses, and Nat Pendleton as the loyal if slightly dim ambulance driver. He in the end actually proves most useful. I always liked Nell Craig as the eternally put upon Nurse Parker who Barrymore berates throughout the series. The relationship is obviously based on Monty Woolley and Mary Wickes from The Man Who Came To Dinner.

Phil Brown should come in for praise as well as the charming and psychotic young suitor. A character very much borrowed from Emlyn Williams's Night Must Fall and played on screen by MGM's own Robert Montgomery.

Calling Dr. Gillespie proved the Dr. Kildare series still had life even without Kildare.

Did doctors really say such thing 60 years ago? Lionel Barrymore utters this line to the naive parents of poor Donna Reed's indeed very troubled suitor.

The first thing he does is kill a dog. This is glossed over by the characters but I can't imagine such a thing happening in a movie today. Certainly not after the famous National Lampoon cover.

This man is played very subtly and frighteningly by Phil Brown -- surely a greatly overlooked actor. Indeed, as his travels carry him farther from Reed and Barrymore, he becomes a killer. And the movie looks, for much of its duration, like a film noir.

It's very suspenseful. And with its hospital setting, it made me think of a movie decades later -- more slick, stylish, surely more expensive: "Dressed To Kill." The comic touches pretty much disqualify it is as a noir: Barrymore flirts with adoring female students; Nat Pendleton faints a couple times. And its being part of the Dr. Kildaire series, even sans Lew Ayres, sort of pulls it from the category too. But it's an interesting sidelight to the noir genre.

This highly interesting little film almost fits into all three categories, but still doesn't fully meet the requirements for any of them! Though to be honest, this first Kildare movie--without Kildare--seems to be more of a crime/thriller than any of the earlier films in the series; that is, it focuses more on the crime aspect.

Our favorite over-the-top curmudgeon on wheels investigates the case of a, by all appearances, nice, well-mannered young man who just happens to have the nasty habit of turning psycho at the drop of a hat...and ends up becoming the killer's target.

The whole cast does a nice job, though as I stated earlier, the serious plot is sometimes undermined by the comedic undertone.

This is the first film in the series after MGM kicked Lew Ayers out for being a conscientious objector during the war, and that's when the "Dr. Kildare" series became the "Dr. Gillespie" series. This first one is pretty good, and very suspenseful; the script also contains a classic Gillespie line: "I'm sorry to tell you, you're son's a mental case."

Dr. Gillespie (Lionel Barrymore) is asked by an old friend for help with a young man named Roy Todwell (Phil Brown) who may be going crazy. Along with psychiatrist Dr. Gerniede (Philip Dorn), Gillespie tries to convince Roy's parents that he needs medical help before he hurts someone. But they are resistant and soon Roy has gone on a full-blown killing spree, with every intention of making Dr. Gillespie his next victim.

The first of MGM's Dr. Gillespie series starring Lionel Barrymore. The series is a continuation of the Dr. Kildare series without star Lew Ayres. This movie attempts to set up a possible replacement for Ayres in thickly-accented Philip Dorn, but it doesn't click. Dorn is fine but the mentor/mentee relationship between Gillespie and Kildare isn't there. Phil Brown makes for a really creepy psychopath. The movie wastes no time showing us how nuts he is -- he kills a little dog in his first scene! Lovely Donna Reed appears as the object of the psycho's affections. Most of the regular supporting cast from the Kildare series is still around here and enjoyable as ever. This includes Alma Kruger, Nat Pendleton, Nell Craig, and Marie Blake. Ava Gardner has a bit part with a couple of lines near the end.

There's a lot of nitpicking of the Kildare/Gillespie movies by some modern viewers who are indignant that a movie made in the 1940s has outdated medical knowledge. This seems especially true whenever the movies addressed psychological cases, such as with this one. I, for one, find these parts of the film interesting as historical curiosities. It gives us a window into how such things were viewed in the past. Why hold it to a modern standard just to mock it is beyond me. This is my favorite of the Gillespie series. Possibly my favorite from both series. A later movie, Dr. Gillespie's Criminal Case, would follow up on the events in this one.