Not as a Stranger

Olivia deHavilland, Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, Gloria Grahame, Broderick Crawford, and Charles Bickford star in "Not as a Stranger," the story of an arrogant young man (Mitchum) and his quest to become a great, godlike doctor. Along the way, he learns something about becoming a human being.

What a cast - Lon Chaney, Jr. even has a minor role as Mitchum's drunken father. Mae Clarke is a nurse. Harry Morgan plays a big eater, Virginia Christine his wife. If you look fast, you'll spot Lee Marvin and also Jerry Paris from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." Mitchum and Sinatra are old to be medical students - Sinatra was 40 and Mitchum, 38. Mitchum is nevertheless very effective as an arrogant but poor man desperate to become a doctor - so desperate, in fact, that when he finds out that nurse deHavilland has $4,000 in the bank, he romances and marries her. Once out of medical school, he joins a country practice headed by Charles Bickford and meets sexy, lonely Gloria Grahame - and you nearly can see the sparks. Both actors had hot presences, both oozed sex appeal - I would have loved to have seen them in a star teaming instead of a subplot.

This is a very good film - perhaps overly long - but it still holds interest because of the performances and the characters they play. It's very much the story of Mitchum's character and evolution and his marriage to deHavilland. In these days of special effects, a character-driven story is refreshing.

All the performances are good, Sinatra supplying the wisecracks as a loyal friend of Mitchum's and the only one who understands him. There have been comments that he was miscast. There is such a thing as a society doctor, however, and the Sinatra character was on the track, so I didn't find his characterization that unrealistic.

The towering performance, of course, comes from Olivia deHavilland as Kris, a simple Swedish nurse who falls in love with Mitchum and marries him, only to find it isn't much of a relationship. I say "of course" because in my opinion, deHavilland was one of the great actresses of the classic era, capable of playing a wide variety of roles and in different genres. Sweet and gentle as Melanie, plain, in love, and bitter in "The Heiress," a petulant ingénue in "It's Love I'm After," a young beauty in "The Adventures of Robin Hood," elegant but tough in "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte," she's letter-perfect as Kris. She is believable from the time she comes on camera with her unattractive blond hairdo, her accent, her plain ways, and her shyness. As Sinatra points out, she's not doctor's wife material - no parents who belong to a country club, no class - "She should marry a farmer," he says. 38 when the film was made, deHavilland is totally sympathetic as Mitchum criticizes her for not being smart and turns his back on her, not realizing her value as a wife and as a woman.

A very good movie. Recommended.

***SPOILERS**** Very effective, if a bit over dramatic at times, medical drama having to do with a man who's so obsessed in becoming a doctor that he loses touch with the feelings of those around and close to him. Despertly wanting to continue his education in medical school Lucas Marsh, Robert Mitchum, goes so far as making a play for nurse Kristina Hedvigson, Olivia De Haviland, who he needs to pay for his tuition. Kristina a very sweet and caring young woman who's anything but the hot number that Lucas would normally go for is flattered by the attention that Lucus is giving her and in no time at all accepts his proposal for marriage. Kristine also without as much as saying a word pays for Lucas tuition which turns out to be a very good investment with him graduating at the top of his class.

Al Broome, Frank Sinatra, a fellow med student and Lucas' best friend sees through his fake romancing of Kristine which has him almost knocked cold by an enraged Lucas. Throughout the movie Al is the one person who tries to keep the two from splitting up when Kristina finally senses that she's being taken for a ride by her new husband.

It's when he's still in medical school that Lucas' arrogant and rebellious attitude toward his fellow doctors comes to the surface with him challenging Dr. Detrick, Whit Bissell, a teacher at the school about a medical procurer he's teaching the students which almost has him kicked out of the class and school. It takes a very painful apology by Lucas to keep him from having his medical career from ending before it ever began.

Now a full-fledged doctor Lucas and Kristine moves into the sleepy little town of Greenville to start his practice. It's also at Greenville where he starts to have an affair with local débutante Harriet Lange, Gloria Grahame, that leads to Kristina, who was pregnant at the time, walking out on him.

Much more complicated then you would expect it to be the film "Not as a Stranger" shows human relations at their rawest and most painful. There's in the film Lucas' father Job, Lon Chaney Jr, drinking away his sons tuition money that his wife left him. We later have a very explosive confrontation between father and son where Job is left crawling into his bottle of booze and ending up later in the movie, to Lucas' shock and horror, under the wheels of a city bus crushed to death. There's also Lucus' friendship with the wise-cracking and comical yet at the same time caring and understanding Al Broome. Lucus' hurts Al by bringing out, right in front of his fellow doctors and nurses, the fact that he operated on his patient not only without his permission but without checking that if she was suffering from melanoma which could have caused the cancer cells to spread all through her blood-stream. Lucas threatens to have him not only fired from his job as a doctor at the hospital but have his medical licenses revoked. It tuned out that the tumor that Al removed was benign.

Lucas' God-like belief in his ability as a man of medicine makes it almost impossible for anyone to work with him by demanding total perfection of the medical personal in Greenville Hospital, like his does of himself. Where at the same time he's anything but the perfect husband to his wife the mentally and emotionally abused Kristina. It's when Al checked out Kristina and finds that she's pregnant and very upset about it that he realizes that his friend Lucas is slowly causing her to have a breakdown. When he sense that instead of being overjoyed with the thought of starting a family with her husband she's going into a state of deep depression instead!

Juggling his duties as a doctor with his affair with Harrit Lucas' world comes to a crashing end. It's when he's suddenly called into the hospital operating room to operate on his friend and fellow doctor Dave Ruckelman, Charles Brickford, who just had a massive heart-attack and is not expected to pull through. Lucas who preformed miracles on the operating table in the past couldn't save his friend this time around. Just when it seemed that he got Daves heart back to normal it suddenly flat-lined, causing Dave to pass away.leaving Lucus shocked and destroyed in him feeling for the very first time that he isn't as infallible as he always thought that he was.

Coming back home, from where he was earlier kicked out, to Kristina a broken and helpless man Lucas finally saw what he was so blinded to. Lucas now realizes just how much he needed Kristina and how without her he never would have made it out of medical school and in the world of preventive medicine. Kristina, to her credit, took Lucas back knowing that his arrogance and ego-maniacal sense of self-importance died on the operating table together with his and her good friend and associate Dr.Dave Ruckleman.

Stanley Kramer made his directorial debut here, following story of a medical intern who marries for money, later becoming a country doctor with an unhappy love life. Surprisingly involving adaptation of Morton Thompson's novel is both cynical and humorous, and Kramer really excels in the scenes behind hospital doors, particularly in the patient montages. He takes a good while to warm up however, and the actors also struggle getting into character. Robert Mitchum doesn't strike me as the medic type, and neither does Frank Sinatra (cutting up à la Jack Lemmon, giving the film some bounce nevertheless), but Olivia de Havilland does good work in the romance department. Second-half of the picture is more assured, if more routine, but the film is quite entertaining on the whole. **1/2 from ****

Many have panned Robert Mitchum's performance in this film, but I think that his lack of expression and emotion, other than anger, suits the character very well.

Mitchum's Marsh is a completely self-absorbed individual. He's committed to medicine and can't understand human failings, especially his own. His character's cold demeanor perfectly reflects the fact that Marsh has no outer life. If he often appears robotic, it's largely because he's programmed himself to shut out everything human, ironically in service to humanity.

Of course he's a great doctor, but he's pure hell to work or live with. Bursting with pride, insensitive to the point of cruelty, Marsh is unreachable and, in more than one sense of the term, untouchable. Mitchum conveys all of this very naturally, perhaps because so much of his performance is rooted in the dark world of film noir, where the actor first made his mark. He's a physician from the neck up, but he has the heart of a contract killer. That he heals instead of kills is his patients' good fortune, though of little solace to his friends or his wife.

Although Mitchum's interpretation remains controversial, many of the other performances in `Not as a Stranger' are beyond criticism. Olivia deHavilland, as his suffering spouse, is superb as always. Charles Bickford, an actor who deserves a much greater reputation, is the epitome of a small town doctor. And surprisingly, Broderick Crawford is excellent as a gruff professor of pathology.

On the other hand, Frank Sinatra's pediatrician isn't as strong, though he has some good scenes when he tries to help Mitchum see the error of his ways. Gloria Grahame, unfortunately, is stuck with a seductress role that just as well could have been cut.

There are other weaknesses. George Antheil's score, by way of Wagner and Richard Strauss, is pretty hard to take. The script and direction are uneven. Many scenes are compelling, such as when Crawford literally throws the book at Sinatra or when deHavilland and Mitchum have one of their confrontations. Others fall flat and there is a tendency, typical in most of Stanley Kramer's work, to keep making points at the expense of the story. For example, the med school sequences with Whit Bissell's greedy and unethical Dr Dietrich (interesting choice of name there) cover a darker side of the profession very well. There's really no need for Jesse White, terribly miscast as a lawyer who cozies up to Grahame, to bring up ethical issues much later in the film.

Recommended as an above average melodrama and as an interesting time capsule of mid-50s medicine. (Though I found it hard to believe patients were allowed to smoke in the wards!)

There has been a lot of criticism of Robert Mitchum in this film. I thought he was perfectly cast. I haven't seen this movie since I was a teen, in the 1960s. However, there were three scenes in the movie that moved me so strongly I can see them in my mind's eye all these years later. The first is the emotional scene when Olivia de Havilland can take no more of Mitchum's treatment and tells him to get out. She was so powerful and poignant. The second was when Mitchum was trying to revive Bickford and couldn't. Finally, the scene where he went back home, and de Havilland opened the door and Mitchum just stood there looking at her so pathetically. I just finished watching The Snake Pit and I'm going to go rent Not as a Stranger. She is such an amazing actress!