On demande le docteur Gillespie

Did doctors really say such thing 60 years ago? Lionel Barrymore utters this line to the naive parents of poor Donna Reed's indeed very troubled suitor.

The first thing he does is kill a dog. This is glossed over by the characters but I can't imagine such a thing happening in a movie today. Certainly not after the famous National Lampoon cover.

This man is played very subtly and frighteningly by Phil Brown -- surely a greatly overlooked actor. Indeed, as his travels carry him farther from Reed and Barrymore, he becomes a killer. And the movie looks, for much of its duration, like a film noir.

It's very suspenseful. And with its hospital setting, it made me think of a movie decades later -- more slick, stylish, surely more expensive: "Dressed To Kill." The comic touches pretty much disqualify it is as a noir: Barrymore flirts with adoring female students; Nat Pendleton faints a couple times. And its being part of the Dr. Kildaire series, even sans Lew Ayres, sort of pulls it from the category too. But it's an interesting sidelight to the noir genre.