Dr. Bull

"Doctor Bull" is Ford's first of three collaborations with Will Rogers. Much like their later pictures, it combines humor and drama with greater emphasis on dialogue and performance rather than narrative. Mr. Ford admired Rogers' folksy charm and found in him a figure whose moral wisdom perfectly matched with his own. In these leisurely and unpretentious pictures, Rogers is successfully a healer and reconciler, but, like most of Ford's subsequent protagonists, he is also a melancholy and lonely figure.

Though it is nowhere near the charm, subtlety and enduring greatness of "Judge Priest"(1934) & "Steamboat 'Round the Bend"(1935), "Doctor Bull" is nonetheless worth seeing for Mr. Rogers' loving portrayal of a small-town Connecticut doctor combating typhus and narrow-mindedness.

It is interesting to note that in the same year Rogers starred in another whiff of Americana - Henry King's lovely and often underrated "State Fair."

Doctor Bull (1933)

** (out of 4)

John Ford film about a kind country doctor (Will Rogers) who gets the town talking when he starts a relationship with a widow (Vera Allen). Soon enough the doctor is fighting rumors and suspicion more than illness. I was really shocked to see how old fashioned this film was in two ways. On the positive side is that director Ford makes an authentic looking picture as we believe the settings very well. However, on the down side, this film looks as if it were made in 1915. Early sound movies always featured problems but this one was made in 1933 so the technology was high enough to where there's no excuse for the technical quality of the film. The camera-work is shaky at best and even the soundtrack is pretty poor. The entire look of the film really makes it annoying to watch and the screenplay doesn't do too much with the characters. Rogers is good in his role but I was really left bored with the supporting cast. Andy Devine steals the show as a man who always has something bothering him.

The best remembered stars of the early 1930s may be such beautiful and provocative sirens as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, but at the time they were slightly outdone at the box office and the reliable Quigley poll by more down-to-earth and homely figures, chief among them Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler and of course Will Rogers. Audiences warmed to his air of honesty and decency in what was a time of great economic strife and social confusion. Will was a busy man in 1933, and while his biggest hit of the year was the sublime State Fair, he also made a number of lesser pictures which nonetheless had all the merits of his gentle personality.

Doctor Bull is a neat little tale of a small town medic up against closed-minded gossipmongers on the one hand and ravaging businessmen on the other. Director John Ford depicts the scenes with a characteristically passive hand. His camera is mostly to one side of the action, and there are few close-ups. He carefully follows movement and changes the angle occasionally to stop scenes getting stale, but barring one or two key moments (such as the shot from behind the table of a drunk Rochelle Hudson), the technique is so subtle we are allowed to forget the camera even exists. Fox studios, where this was produced, were among the last studios to start using incidental music in their movies, and even for the era Doctor Bull is starkly quiet. The overall feeling is one of tranquillity and unhurried simplicity.

Such a feeling also radiates from Rogers himself. His is a calm and methodical performance, and yet one that expresses a great deal. Rogers is the kind of man who can command a lot of attention and respect by doing very little, and therein lies a lot of his appeal. He was chiefly thought a comedy actor, but most of the comedy in Doctor Bull lies in quirky supporting players (as it often did in John Ford pictures). However, Rogers still shows a knack for delivering a line for comedic effect, usually with characteristic nonchalance. When one of his young patients is "rescued" from vaccination by his father, Rogers calls out "Hope your arm don't hurt ya tomorrow", without even looking up from his business. A sly little comment, made with just enough of a knowing hint to come across as a private joke with audience.

Such a light little movie as Doctor Bull was never going to win awards or move audiences to floods of tears or gales of laughter, but it has a nice, inoffensive quality to it that is very relaxing. It uses the era's "pre-code" liberalism, not to shock or titillate, but to deal sensitively (albeit covertly) about the issue of pregnancy outside marriage. And thanks to its aura of friendliness which is never forced but simply unfolds before us, embodied in the warm and trustworthy Mr Rogers, one cannot help but feel uplifted by it.

Despite starring Will Rogers and being marketed as a comedy, I really think that does this film an injustice and viewers may well feel confused by the lack of comedy. While Rogers has a few good zingers and one liners here and there, this isn't the point of the film and to me it's much more of a drama--much like the excellent film ONE MAN'S JOURNEY. Maybe much of the reason people see this as a comedy could also be because Rogers and director John Ford also teamed up shortly after this film for the comedy JUDGE PRIEST.

In DR. BULL, Rogers plays the title character--a very, very hard-working country doctor who is too seldom appreciated by the community. While some see him as a sort of savior, many old busy-bodies can only focus on all the perceived wrongs he has done--mostly because they are just vicious and sexless old hags! While these roles are very stereotypical and may seem unreal, I have personally known quite a few women EXACTLY like them. Even today, they pervade small towns, churches, social clubs, PTAs and other groups. Because of this, this film is a great form of social satire--even over 70 years later! As for the aesthetics of the film, I was quite impressed. John Ford really captured the small town feel and the winter scenes looked so real and inviting. Additionally, Rogers showed he really could act--playing a folksy but more complete character than usual--with flaws, strengths and emotions. All in all, a lovely film and a great time capsule. This film should be more famous than it is--and it's certainly much better than JUDGE PRIEST.

John Ford certainly loved the medical profession. Go through his film list and wherever you see a doctor character it will inevitably it will be a noble if perhaps flawed character. His most famous doctor was Josiah Boone in Stagecoach where Thomas Mitchell won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. But in Doctor Bull, the first of the three films Ford did with Will Rogers, Rogers is in the title role of George Bull, small New England town physician who has taken care of his town for two going on three generations.

Not that some of the town appreciates his toil. He's angered the powerful Banning family headed by Berton Churchill who has not only poisoned the town water, but poisoned the town against Doctor Bull. His gossipy sisters have filled the town with speculation about the doctor's relationship with Vera Allen a widow. Not like they're not adults, but you have to wonder about the lives that people lead when they're main concern is what everyone else is doing.

The film has some parallels to the Bing Crosby/Barry Fitzgerald film Welcome Stranger when for a brief moment it's thought the town has an epidemic. Some of the vested interests in Fitzgerald's New England town want to remove him as well.

Some of the best comic moments are provided by Rogers and Andy Devine who plays a soda jerk in the local pharmacy and is a constant main in the butt to Rogers because of his imagined ills. Devine is the hypochondriac's hypochondriac.

Rogers is always working 24/7 for his people and using a method that was tried successfully with animals affects a cure from a disease that has left Howard Lally bedridden for months. What happens there gives Rogers the last laugh on his ungrateful town.

The observations on the human condition of Will Rogers are timeless. Medicine does not look the same today as it did for Doctor Bull. But the truths are eternal.