Undercover Doctor

J Carroll Naish plays here a doctor, and also a lost in advance hero, or may I say anti hero, a lead for whom the audience can feel empathy despite his illegal activities. This is a gangster film belonging to the ones Louis King and Robert Florey directed for Paramount Pictures in the late thirties and early forties, starring J Carroll Naish, Akim Tamiroff, Lloyd Nolan, Buster Crabbe, Anthony Quinn...Fast paced, dark, downbeat crime dramas very fast paced, well made and acted. They look like Warner crime flicks of this same period. Most of those stories were highly inspired from FBI archives, files, and rather underrated in film noir history.

Unsuccessful small town doctor J. Carroll Naish has been hitting the bottle to while away the empty time. His nurse, Janice Logan, tells him he doesn't need her, and heads off to the big city. Medical work comes his way when fleeing gangster Broderick Crawford has him operate on one of his gang, then gives him a big wad of money. Naish uses it to set up in the city, reunite with Miss Logan, and start a fashionable practice, eked out with occasional work on shot crooks. Meanwhile, Miss Logan starts dating FBI Special Agent Lloyd Nolan .... if he can ever show up for dinner. His assignment is to track down Crawford's gang, which means all the threads are going to come together.

The good thing about this movie, based on a book by J. Edgar Hoover, is the early roles for the above-named actors, as well as Heather Angel, George Meeker, Paul Fix.... and a sympathetic role for Naish, who gets to really stretch with a conflicted character, The downside is the erratic pacing of the movie. There will be an exciting stretch that leads nowhere, and then it's back to lab work and grumbling. The Production Code's hand hangs far too heavily on this one, and it seems a lot longer than its 75 minutes.

... because the screenplay he penned was passable as a drama considering it was written by somebody that was not a professional writer, but mainly consisted of a lot of crime drama clichés from 1930's cinema all mixed together into a rather predictable plot.

The film has a drunken doctor (J. Carroll Naish as Dr. Morgan) with few patients who takes the easy way when he is confronted with hoodlums that are willing to pay him well to fix up members of their gang after run-ins with the law. The gang leader, Eddie Krator, is played quite convincingly by Broderick Crawford in one of his earliest screen roles. Regardless of the probable bad direction that is producing stiff performances in the rest of the cast, Crawford shines through this material and is quite good.

There are the only two significant female characters in the movie - Janice Logan representing a "good influence" in Dr. Morgan's life as Margaret Hopkins, the nurse that secretly loves him, and Heather Angel as Cynthia Weld, Morgan's socialite fiancée that seems to be more of a trophy than a love interest to him. Neither of these women gets much screen time and their performances are pretty flat.

However, there's lots of screen time for what J. Edgar knew best, the FBI agents at work and on the trail of the Krator gang and whatever doctor that has been patching them up. Here again we have a good performance by an up and coming actor - Lloyd Nolan as agent Robert Anders. As the FBI zeroes in on Krator, here we get to the few rather corny lines of the film. We are shown Krator as he knocks on door after door of his usual contacts looking for sanctuary with basically the same reply "I wouldn't help you for a million dollars! After all THESE ARE G MEN!!!!" If it comes your way I'd give it a look just to see J. Edgar Hoover doing a passable job at his writing hobby. It is certainly nothing to write home about but neither is it boring.

Interesting factoid - Broderick Crawford actually played J. Edgar Hoover in "The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover" in 1977. Lloyd Nolan also had a part in the same film as attorney general Harlan Stone who appointed J. Edgar as head of the FBI. Members of both parties didn't like that film and nobody would have dared make it while Hoover was still alive.

Solid B crime picture, one of several films based on stories in J. Edgar Hoover's 1938 book Persons in Hiding. I haven't read the book but I have seen all of the movies. Sounds like a real page turner. This one's about a struggling small town doctor who gets involved with gangsters. It's a fun, fast paced quickie with a good cast headed up by J. Carrol Naish, one of the great character actors of Old Hollywood. The story is slight and probably would have been fine as a 20 minute Crime Does Not Pay short. But the padding isn't bad. Naish's character's turn from meek to cocky is very sudden, however. Give it a look. It's only an hour so it's not much of a commitment.

It was entirely coincidental that I watched "Doctors Don't Tell" shortly before watching "Undercover Doctor"....but it was a fortunate coincidence. This is because both films are very similar...even though they were brought out by different studios. If I didn't know that one was a Republic film and the other from RKO, I might have assumed that "Doctors Don't Tell" was a remake or re-working of the other movie.

When the story begins, Dr. Morgan (J. Carroll Naish) is an alcoholic but despite this, he seems to be a decent man. So, when he's asked to patch up a crook and NOT alert the police, he informs the gang that he WILL report the shooting to the authorities. But somehow he decides not to report it and you wonder why. Later, however, you realize it's because the doctor wants to do more business with these hoods. After all, it's very profitable doing work with criminals. Much of the story is about the FBI efforts to stop him and his new 'friends'.

While these two films are very similar, I prefer "Undercover Doctor". The story is a bit more exciting and Naish provides a surprisingly understated performance...something rarely seen with Naish and his tendency to overplay ethnic types. An interesting B-movie...one that is a notch or two better than average.