Addio dottor Abelman!

The Last Angry Man marks the farewell big screen appearance of Paul Muni who had been for about a dozen years concentrating on his stage career. Muni goes back to his roots in this one playing an elderly Jewish doctor in a mixed Brooklyn neighborhood of 1959. He upholds a lot of values that the present generation seems to have lost. He's a man content to be a general practitioner and even makes house calls. He lives with wife Nancy Pollock and nephew Joby Baker.

Baker is an aspiring journalist and writes a story about his uncle when he saves a young black woman played by an unknown Cicely Tyson at the time. A local paper picks it up and it comes to the attention of TV producer David Wayne who thinks the doctor might be a good subject for a television documentary.

Wayne gets a lot more than he bargained for, Muni is quite the opinionated crusty old soul and not willing to just go on the air like a Queen for a Day contestant. He likes his life the way it is, doing good work for it's own reward and enough to live on. This puts him in conflict with Baker and with Wayne who are a pair that could have been working models for Budd Schulberg's Sammy Glick. People like that who want a quick buck without the work, Muni calls galoots and they seem to be multiplying in his life.

Daniel Mann directs a finely tuned cast in support of Paul Muni's swan song. This film marks an early appearance of Billy Dee Williams as a brain tumor stricken teenager who his mother, Claudia McNeil brings to Dr. Muni for help. Muni of course takes him to his lifelong friend, a Park Avenue neurosurgeon played by Luther Adler.

Adler has one of his great screen roles also here. He and Muni both went way back over 40 years to the Yiddish Theater on New York's Lower East Side. That helps in both of their performances as lifelong friends and colleagues because they actually were.

Others of note in the cast are Dan Tobin as the sleazy network executive Betsy Palmer as Wayne's supportive wife and Robert F. Simon as the head of the drug company that would sponsor the show.

It's Paul Muni's show and a really grand farewell to one of the finest actors ever.

Paul Muni is excellent as a doctor in Brooklyn. I remember doctors like him, from when I was a child. They'd leave their dinners to get cold if a patient needed help. Now they mostly give three minutes of their time at most.

The family is allowed to be clearly Jewish. I wonder, though, what the word galoot is about. Muni keeps using it. I think of it as a sort of comic strip term, like calling a boxer a big galoot. Luther Adler, as his friend, another doctor, using some Yiddish.

David Wayne is thoroughly convincing as the crass TV man who decides doc's story would sell pills for his network's sponsor. Everyone is good, really,.

Though the patient we see Muni treating is black, it is not a forced racial drama. His played by Billy Dee Williams and the fine Claudia McNeil is his mother.

I feel this movie tugging on my sleeve and saying, "Hey! Hey! Look how significant I am!" It isn't a great movie but it does its job well and Muni is superb.

This is the story of an elderly Jewish doctor who lives and works in the Brooklyn slums. He is dedicated to his work and his patients. The movie revolves around his nephew's attempts to produce a documentary based on the doctor's life. The movie is ok, but Paul Muni shines. He received an Oscar nomination for this, his last role. Billy Dee Williams makes his movie debut as one of the doctor's patients. He plays a young thug with a brain tumor. He's a difficult patient and the doctor has to chase after him in order to treat him. If you look closely at the girl left on the porch in the opening scene, you'll see that it's Cicely Tyson, also an unknown at that time.

Paul Muni had long been out of pictures when in the fifties his success on the Broadway stage in 'Inherit the Wind' reawakened Hollywood's interest in him.

Two decades after his thirties heyday when he usually played older than his years, now in the era of television he was actually playing a genuinely old man with the result that his 68 year-old Brooklyn slum doctor Sam Abelman looks hardly distinguishable from his Louis Pasteur.

Some of the attacks the trenchant old codger makes on the drugs company that sponsors his show are still relevant today. Muni wears the makeup which leaves the field clear for David Wayne to play a surprisingly 'straight' role.

The Last Angry Man explores the themes of living with integrity and not being corrupted or co-opted by the world's materialism. Paul Muni plays a Jewish doctor living in a Brooklyn neighborhood that has, to use a euphemism, changed. He continues to treat the neighborhood's residents for minimal fees, including a very young Billy Dee Williams, who plays a gang-banger, angry at the world, who Muni believes has a brain tumor.

Muni's nephew is an aspiring journalist who is caught up in glitz and glamor. When Muni saves the life of a young black woman who has been dumped on his doorstep after an assault, his nephew senses an opportunity and writes the story in the newspaper. A television producer picks up on it and sees profiling Muni on his new television program as his ticket to fame.

Muni's character is really too complex to portray completely in this film, but the interplay between the doctor and his patients portrays him as both compassionate and moral. He relates on a spiritual level to the character Billy Dee Williams plays, sensing that both of them are rebelling in their own ways against injustice and abuses of power. Dr. Abelman's last act is to visit Williams in jail rather than proceed with his greatly anticipated television appearance, reinforcing his determination to live a life of integrity and in the words of Thoreau (an author quoted frequently throughout the film), "march to the beat of a different drummer."