Bedside

Usually Warren William played someone who starts down the easy crooked way deliberately. Here it is more of an accident, almost the stuff of film noir if you look strictly at the plot. Warren plays a X-ray technician, Bob Brown, in love with a beautiful nurse, Caroline Grant (Jean Muir). Bob seems happy with his easy-going although somewhat chaotic existence, but Caroline wants more for him. She talks him into returning to finish his one remaining year of medical school and gives him her life savings - fifteen hundred dollars. Bob, always a victim to his impulses with liquor and gambling, gambles Caroline's money away on the train there. He manages to cover this up by writing fake letters about his progress, but then his year is up and he must return home.

Before Bob has to tell Caroline the truth he runs across a morphine addict who happens to be an ex-doctor. Bob makes a deal with the devil, almost literally, and agrees to supply the addict with morphine if the ex-doctor will let him use his licensing credentials. Bob seems to forget one key point - by definition an addict can never have enough and thus always comes back for more. By the end of this film the real Dr. Martel is popping up everywhere and under the oddest circumstances to the point where the viewer wonders if this guy's appearances are always real or perhaps sometimes an apparition as a metaphor for Bob's conscience finally getting the best of him.

Bob sets up practice in New York City, where nobody knows him, as Dr. J. Herbert Martel. He gets an actual doctor - Donald Meeks as the unsuspecting Dr. George Wiley - to be the actual physician and his partner. Wiley always sees the patients first, and then Bob as Martel just cleans up behind him dispensing charm and useless advice and prescriptions. He's aiming at the society crowd whose only illnesses are boredom and weight problems, but occasionally a real patient with real problems wanders in and catches Bob off guard. With all of Bob's slickness in this operation he has done one really un-slick thing - hired his girlfriend, who knows him so well, as his nurse who thinks Bob is on the level and is an actual licensed physician. This proves to be Bob's undoing.

If you like Warren William as the precode cad, as the guy who knows right from wrong but does the wrong thing anyways, as the hard guy who ultimately has a soft spot for the right woman, you'll love this short little feature film. The best precode touch of the movie is unexpected, and actually comes from Donald Meeks as Dr. Wiley pulling a Dr. Frankenstein and bringing the dead back to life with one of his inventions. Highly recommended

Warren William was often cast in detective series. But he is at his best in dark roles such as this one.

This movie could scarcely be improved on. It is director Robert Florey at his eerie best. William is ideally cast. Jean Muir, whose career was ruined by the Blacklist, is both touching and appropriately strong-willed.

William plays an ambitious young man a year short of his medical degree. A down-and-out doctor comes into the office where he's working. The guy is desperate for some morphine. William strikes a Faustian bargain with him.

"Bedside" is consistently chilling. William is not a bad person. He certainly is not an admirable one, though.

Kathryn Sergava is suitably exotic as the opera diva who ill-advisedly seeks his ministrations. And Donald Meek gives one of his more interesting performances as the physician William hires to work with him.

It's not a horror movie. It's an early version of what came to be called film noir. It also presages the often excellent MGM series of short, cautionary films called"Crime Does Not Pay."

Warren William is an X-ray technician with an affair going on with nurse Jean Muir. He has three years of medical school, so she lends him enough money for the fourth. He promptly loses it in a poker game, but a couple of year later returns with a medical degree. He's bought it for chum change from a legitimate graduate of a medical school who's now a hophead. With real doctor Donald Meek to do the actual work, and publicity man Allen Jenkins to puff it all as William's brilliance, he's soon in demand as a medical genius.

William gives a fine performance as the faker, offering an air of calm assurance, a rapid intelligence to seize any opportunity, and a nervous fear underlying it all to show the character.

Contrast this to the rather stuffy behavior of the established doctors; in the end, they are too fearful of the good name of the profession -- or the perceived scandal of not having exposed the phony earlier or the need for the movie to have a happy ending of some variety -- to police their own profession. Perhaps they need to do some actual publicity of their own to compete with the quacks!

Warren William is a real wastrel who completed 3 years of medical school before quitting. He works as an X-ray technician and dates nurse Jean Muir when he isn't hitting the town and picking up other women. What he is is really charming, so Muir, convinced that his way with patients would make him an excellent doctor, lends him the money to return to medical school.

He loses all her money playing poker on the train. Afraid to admit what happened, he works odd jobs while writing her letters telling her how well he's doing at school. He meets David Landau, a former doctor who's morphine addiction has lead him to ruin. He buys his medical degree and doctors the diploma promising to keep money flowing his way. He moves to New York City and hires real doctor Donald Meek to set up practice with him, essentially tricking him into doing all the work.

Pre-code films are really something. There's not a chance that film with a lead this despicable would be made even a year later. William pulls it off rather convincingly, working the charm while being an enormous cad. The madness by the film's end includes Meek experimenting with raising the dead and William having to admit his fraud when Muir's life is threatened.

Once upon a time, old films on the Late, Late Show were the object of derision, antiquities from another era, now merely of interest as something to chuckle at in the wee small hours of the morning. Happily, those days are gone forever, and vintage films now get the respect they so rightly deserve, no matter what their age, and no one more than I supports this more intelligent, enlightened attitude. But there are still quite a few turkeys lurking in the vaults which deserve the raspberry, but still manage to provide an hour's perverse diversion simply because they are so bad. One such is Bedside. In March 1934, Variety noted that "after being exploited for a solid hour as a gambler, drunkard, cheat and fraud, Warren William is unable in the last three minutes to rehabilitate himself in the grace of the spectator...the chief emotion aroused is regret that he gets the girl instead of taking the jail sentence he very richly deserves...the story is beyond saving, nor is it worth salvage...no picture is better than its plot, and this scenario is hopeless." A classic this is not, but therein lies the secret of its charm. Today's viewers can sit back and watch an abundance of such pre-code plot devices as pre-marital sex and drug addiction, with critical brain operations and bringing the dead back to life merely thrown in as side issues, set against a background of slick 1930's sets, one mind-boggling situation following another, the sum total of which would keep one of today's soaps going for at least six months if not a year. You won't believe a word of it, your jaw will frequently drop at the sheer, shocking absurdity of it all, to say nothing of the fact that the players manage to say their lines with total sincerity, without ever once cracking up. So relax and enjoy it. That's what movies like this are for. Watch for it on Turner Classic Movies; it's in their library.