Bedside

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."

Bob Brown (Warren William) dropped out of medical school a year before graduating. His nursing girlfriend Caroline Grant (Jean Muir) insists that he finishes his degree and even pays for it. Instead, he loses all her money. He lies to her while working as a hospital orderly. He comes back to her pretending to have graduated.

This is not the expected opening premise. It is interesting to paint him in the good while he is pulling off this scam. It seems outrageous until I realized that this is the olden times. One could get away with this or at least, believe that he could get away with it. Nevertheless, it is tough to root for him and his lies.

William Warren plays Louis, a mostly-sympathetic scoundrel. He is a womanizer and gambler who has some medical school but lacks the discipline necessary to finish. David Landau shines in a supporting role: a washed up, morphine-addicted doctor who sells Louis his medical license for cash and a lifetime supply of morphine fixes. (The bio on Landau says "wooden." He doesn't seem so here.) Louis' ego and greed propel him to increasing medical risks. You know that sooner or later his ineptitude will result in death. The only question is "Whose?"

This movie was made when physician advertising was considered highly unethical. But Louis cleverly bends the rules! It was also made when the dangers of radiation exposure were unknown; notice that none of the characters in the X-ray room wear any protection.

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.

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!