Il dottore e la ragazza

Other reviewers of The Doctor and the Girl have rightfully praised its excellent treatment of a plot-line that at first glance seems familiar, even hackneyed. Of course, the sterling performances of everybody on screen are a huge asset to the picture. But for me, the gold medal has to be given to Curtis Bernhardt's expert handling of Theodore Reeves' adroit screenplay.

It's a tightly-paced film, with very few exteriors. But Bernhardt's brilliant interiors give superb depth to each scene and each character, from stern Charles Coburn to sylphlike Janet Leigh to earnest Bruce Bennett (in a great supporting role as an unassuming ENT specialist). The director keeps everybody's performance low-key and believable. In her first scenes, sickly Janet Leigh seems to be wearing no makeup at all. And even Charles Coburn isn't allowed to milk his scenes to the limit.

A master of lighting and camera angles, Bernhardt was one of the numerous excellent filmmakers in exile from Nazi Germany. His filmography is a strong one, studded with many entertaining films of the forties and fifties. Conflict, starring a quintessential Humphrey Bogart, and My Reputation with Barbara Stanwyck at her best, are two goodies that come to mind. And let's not forget Possessed, highlighted by Joan Crawford's hallucinatory performance.

But unlike some other exiled directors - such as Wilder, Lubitsch, Lang and Sirk - Curtis Bernhardt hasn't got any universally acclaimed masterpieces on his résumé, so he is often neglected by movie historians. But he was certainly a talent to reckon with, and any of his pictures deserve a careful look.

P.S. I totally concur with EliotTempleton's comments about Hollywood having a very long history of movies with medical themes. In fact Theodore Reeves, the main writer for this film, was the author of many medical screenplays dating back to the 1930s.

Glenn Ford is a young doctor from a well-connected family in "The Doctor and the Girl," a 1949 film also starring Janet Leigh, Charles Coburn, Gloria de Haven, Bruce Bennett, and Nancy Davis, our former first lady.

Ford plays Dr. Michael Corday, an up and coming doctor who comes to do a rotation in a hospital and brings a lot of his well-known doctor/father's attitudes with him. The senior Dr. Corday (Coburn) has fixed attitudes about family and medicine and runs his home with an iron fist. The first night that Michael returns home from his medical training, his sister Fabienne (de Haven) announces that she's moving to Greenwich Village. In those days it was absolutely unheard of for an unmarried woman to move out of the parental home, so her father's not happy.

Michael isn't liked at the hospital. He's snobby, brusque, and too clinical, interested in his work but not people. Then he runs into a woman he processed in the outpatient ward, Evelyn (Leigh), who is waiting for lung surgery, and he realizes how cold he was to her. He works to make it up to her, and they wind up falling in love, and over his father's strenuous objections, he marries her and gives up the important residency he was promised. He and Evelyn move to her Third Avenue apartment, and Michael sets up practice. Meanwhile, the only child that hasn't disappointed the senior Corday is Mariette (Davis), who is marrying a doctor (when her dad sets the date) and is living at home. Corday Sr. soon learns the effect of his rigidity.

I really liked this film. It was an absorbing family drama, maybe on the soapy side, but there's nothing wrong with that when the characters are well depicted. Glenn Ford is very sincere and likable in his role and gets to show a little more dramatic range than usual; the pretty Leigh is lovely as Evelyn, frail but with an inner toughness. The rest of the cast is solid. Bruce Bennett plays the ENT doctor Michael has to deal with on his rotation. Bennett was in countless films, an Olympic champion in 1928, and died 5 years ago at the age of 100.

Very good movie, well worth seeing.

Hollywood loves making medical dramas, but not all of them become classics through the decades. The Doctor and the Girl is an excellent movie, but I'm willing to bet most people have never heard of it. Glenn Ford and Janet Leigh play the titular characters, and Charles Coburn has a pivotal role as Glenn's father. He's a doctor, too, and he expects Glenn to take over his lucrative practice in a very wealthy neighborhood where there's usually nothing more serious than housewives' nerves. Glenn, however, wants to help the impoverished and seriously sick. They argue constantly about the direction his life will take, and it's very well written because you can see both sides.

You won't find any blood and guts in this movie, like modern medical television shows. But you will find three-dimensional characters who are conflicted when they make life-altering decisions. A father wants what's best for his son, financially and romantically. A young man wants to believe he's making a difference. If you like this drama, try Not As a Stranger or The Young Doctors for equally obscure but powerful stories.

I just wanted to say that the above reviewer is a bit misinformed regarding the history of films about physicians, particularly in the '30s. There was no shortage of movies with doctors as the central character in the early sound era, and some of them are "Men in White," "Internes Can't Take Money," "The Citadel," "Strange Interlude," "Symphony of Six Million," "Arrowsmith," "Yellow Jack," "Doctor X" "The Story of Louis Pasteur," just to name a few off the top of my head, without doing any research. Paramount's "Internes Can't Take Money," starring Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea, was the first movie to feature the character of Dr. James Kildare, created by author Max Brand. I'm sure that the studio's executives rued the fact that they didn't have the foresight to feature the sympathetic young doctor in a series, which is what M-G-M did, starring Lew Ayres as the compassionate and crusading Dr. Jimmy Kildare. That series, by the way, started in the '30s with "Young Dr. Kildare" in 1938, followed by "Calling Dr. Kildare" and "The Secret of Dr. Kildare" in 1939. So, you see, there were quite a few doctors gracing movie screens throughout the 1930s.

In The Doctor And The Girl Harry Cohn decided to sell off half of Glenn Ford's contract to MGM for his services as half of the title of the film. It was the same kind of deal Cohn had with William Holden when he bought half of Holden's contract with Paramount. Now Ford would serve two studios and for loanouts in the future he'd have to have his schedule with both MGM and Columbia clear.

I hope you all that Ford was the doctor part of the title role. The girl is Janet Leigh, but there are two other prominent female roles and they play Ford's sisters, Gloria DeHaven and future first Lady Nancy Davis. They're all Charles Coburn's children and he's a prominent doctor.

Who has every expectation of seeing his son follow in his footsteps and he lays down the law to everyone else be they his children or his colleagues. The youngest Gloria DeHaven rebels, but in very unhealthy ways. Nancy has married a doctor herself in the person of Warner Anderson, but Anderson is determined to succeed as a pediatrician on his own thank you very much without Coburn's help.

But Ford starts off as a chip off the old arrogant block, but after some time working in Bellevue the arrogance flakes off, especially after meeting patient Janet Leigh who is in for some surgery. She's alone in the big city until Ford enters her life.

And Coburn doesn't consider her a suitable candidate for being a doctor's wife. That and his attitude towards his kids in general sets off the plot events in The Doctor And The Girl. He's a tyrannical old cuss, very typical of some of the parts he's played.

Though Glenn Ford had been making movies, mostly at Columbia for ten years he was new to the MGM studio. As was Janet Leigh. The film was shot on location in New York City. I recognize the facade of Bellevue Hospital, nothing much has changed their in 60 years. Of course if the camera were turned to the other side of the street on First Avenue, a great deal has changed.

And as for the disparaging remarks about the working class area of Third Avenue where Janet Leigh lives and to where Ford moves when he marries her, that is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. The cost of their apartment in that same general location would boggle the mind.

Ford and Leigh were fairly new, but for Nancy Davis this was her second film and first speaking role. It was definitely no acting stretch because in real life she was the daughter of a rich and prominent physician, Dr. Loyal C. Davis of Chicago. I'll bet Dr. Davis was a whole lot like Charles Coburn in manner. He was definitely his daughter's mentor in politics and also a mentor for his son-in-law our 40th President.

There are two other roles of prominence, Bruce Bennett has a very nice role as Ford's supervisor at Bellevue, he was an army doctor in the second World War and he's a bit put out with Ford's vaunted connections and let's him know it. And Basil Ruysdael is in a part that fits him perfectly the wise old family friend to Coburn and his clan. Ruysdael is also a doctor, a most prominent surgeon.

The Doctor And The Girl is a good addition to the roll of medical dramas. It's not all that different from what folks would be seeing soon on the small screen with Medic, Dr. Kildare, and Ben Casey. And remember this is MGM the people who did produce the Dr. Kildare series for the big screen.