by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I
settled in relatively late and watched a 1938 MGM “B” called Woman Against
Woman (produced and written by
Edward Chodorov, directed by Robert B. Sinclair, starring Herbert Marshall, Virginia
Bruce and Mary Astor, and only 61 minutes long) on the same disc I’d recorded
from TCM as also contained The Case of the Velvet Claws, Midnight Court and The Divorce of Lady X and all of which seemed to have been paired
because they deal with estranged couples and have scenes taking place in
courtrooms. Before it, though, TCM had shown a screamingly funny Robert
Benchley short called See Your Doctor, even more delightful than most of the Benchley shorts because a) he’s
playing a character — put-upon suburban husband Joseph A. Doakes (ironically “Joe
Doakes” was also the name of the series Warner Bros. cooked up with actor Dave
O’Brien to compete with the Benchley shorts at MGM), who is digging in his
garden when he’s stung by a bee. Only his obnoxious brother-in-law (Hobart
Cavanaugh) gets him scared that he might really have been bitten by a black widow spider and
insists he go to the E.R. — where he’s put upon first by an obnoxious nurse who
keeps tearing up his admission form and filling out a new one on the flimsiest
of pretexts (the district where Benchley/Doakes lives, the fact that an
out-of-towner brought him, etc.) in a grim satire of medical bureaucracy that
rings true even now, then by
the doctor himself (it was one of those sights where you encounter a person you
know you’ve seen in a million
other movies and you think, “Monty Woolley? Here?” — and it was indeed he,
probably appearing in this film unbilled as a favor to his old friend from the
Algonquin Round Table days), who’s trying to look at Doakes’ wound while
simultaneously talking to a child patient on the phone, and in the end of
course it turns out to be a bee sting, it’s already healed by the time the
doctor sees it, and the doctor sends our hapless hero home. (Today, of course,
he’d send his insurance company a four-figure bill!)
