Bad for Each Other (Columbia, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, October 11) I deliberately avoided watching MS-NBC because I really didn’t want to hear any more long, drawn-out war atrocity stories from southern Israel – the stories may be totally true, but the propaganda use of war atrocity tales really appalls me – and instead put on Turner Classic Movies for a night of films featuring their “Star of the Month,” Charlton Heston. The night opened with an acknowledged masterpiece, Touch of Evil (1958), which rather preposterously cast Heston as a Mexican narcotics detective, Janet Leigh as his rather bimbo-esque wife, and Orson Welles – who also directed – as a corrupt cop on the U.S.-Mexico border who crosses swords with him over a cross-border murder case. This is a film that’s been discussed almost to death (including a review by me on a moviemagg post, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2008/09/touch-of-evil-universal-international.html, which was generally positive but filled with a lot of “yes, but”-isms that no longer represent how I feel about this film; this time around it seemed like a stone-cold masterpiece, no apologies needed), and after Touch of Evil almost anything would have seemed like a let-down. The Heston film with which they actually followed Touch of Evil was a 1953 melodrama from Columbia called Bad for Each Other, which contrary to what you might think from the title and from Lizabeth Scott’s presence in the female lead is not a film noir.

Instead it casts Heston as Dr. Tom Owen, who’s just been discharged from the U.S. Army Medical Corps after having served consecutively in both World War II and Korea. Dr. Owen grew up in Coalville, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, and both he and his brother Floyd were from a mining family who were determined to get themselves out of the mines, both literally and figuratively, forever. Dr. Tom did so by going to medical school and then joining the military, while Floyd became the head safety engineer for mining company owner Dan Reasonover (Ray Collins, a member of the Orson Welles stock company who was also in Touch of Evil as the U.S. district attorney, an interesting counterpoint to his casting as homicide cop Lt. Tragg in the concurrently running Perry Mason TV series). Unbeknownst to Reasonover – who’s depicted as one of those impossibly benevolent capitalists that abounded in early-1950’s movies as part of Hollywood’s response to the “Red Scare” – Floyd Owen was taking kickbacks from corrupt contractors and accepting substandard equipment that ultimately led to a mine explosion in which Floyd was among those killed. Dr. Tom Owen returns to Coalville with a vague intent of doing research on treating “black lung” disease (an occupational hazard of mining caused by inhaling coal dust) and thus bettering the miners’ lives and health, but he’s sidetracked when he meets and falls hard for Reasonover’s daughter, twice-married, twice-divorced Helen Curtis (Lizabeth Scott). Dr. Owen takes a job in Pittsburgh as an associate for a high-society doctor named Homer Gleeson (Lester Matthews), who works in what today would be called “concierge medicine” – avoiding health-insured patients and demanding up-front fees to treat only those who can afford to pay.

From that point on, the film, directed by Irving Rapper (who’d made some quite good films at Warner Bros., including the Bette Davis vehicles Now, Voyager and Deception and the George Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue, but on his own descended pretty quickly; his last two films were The Christine Jorgensen Story, about the pioneering Transwoman whose gender-affirming surgery in 1952 shocked and startled the world; and Born Again, a biopic of Charles Colson depicting his transformation from political hit man for Richard Nixon to political hit man for Jesus Christ) from a script by the unlikely team of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? author Horace McCoy and Irving Wallace, descends into med-movie cliché. It’s the old chestnut about an idealistic young doctor who’s side-tracked into a lucrative medical practice treating mostly hypochondriacs with money, only to regain his ideals and change his life around at the end. Sinclair Lewis told this story in his novel Arrowsmith (1925, filmed 1931) and it’s been the subject of countless movies since, including I Take This Woman (begun 1937, finished 1940), with Spencer Tracy as the idealistic young physician and Hedy Lamarr as the rich woman who (almost) ruins him. The voice of reason in this story is Joan Lasher (played by Dianne Foster in an authoritative performance that should have marked her for biggers and betters; instead she got stuck in the salt mines of TV), an idealistic nurse who aspires to go to medical school and become an M.D. herself. Dr. Owen hires Lasher as both a nurse and office secretary, and she takes the job but with a sense of unease at how unethical it all is. The other voice of reason is Dr. Jim Crowley (Arthur Franz), an old army buddy of Dr. Owen’s who shows up at his Pittsburgh office, is disgusted at the money-hungry man he sees, and takes a job with Dr. Leslie Scobee (Rhys Williams), who runs a clinic for injured miners in Coalville.

Most of Dr. Owen’s wealthy clients are just people who drink and/or smoke too much (though there’s a startling, by today’s standards, sequence in which Dr. Owen and Nurse Lasher both light up after an operation and puff away in their medical office!), but one has a real life-threatening emergency: Mrs. Roger Nelson (Marjorie Rambeau) – it’s an indication of how sexist the 1950’s were that we never learn her own first name – who gets “intestinal strangulation” and needs a super-major operation to save her life. Mrs. Nelson says she’ll only trust Dr. Gleeson to do the operation, but Gleeson cops out, telling Owen he hasn’t actually performed surgery of any kind in 10 years, and asks Owen to perform the operation but not to tell anybody. Owen agrees, the operation happens, Mrs. Nelson is saved, but she sees through the guise and realizes it was actually Owen, not Gleeson, who saved her life. The big deus ex machina event that finally transforms Owen from a concierge doctor to a real one is yet another explosion at the Reasonover mine (which Owen learns about just as he’s starting a round of golf with some of the city’s wealthiest and most influential people), and Owen heads to the mine to rescue and save as many of the injured miners as he can. Dr. Crowley is already there, as is Dr. Scobee, and in one scene that’s reasonably suspenseful but would have been even better if the “breakaway” point of the beam weren’t so obvious on screen, Dr. Owen uses his old skills as a miner to prop up a beam that’s about to collapse on a hapless miner and let loose an avalanche of coal and rock that will crush him. Eventually one miner dies but the crew is otherwise unscathed, and Nurse Lasher and Owen end up together as a couple.

Bad for Each Other was originally intended as a fairly high-budgeted film and the role of Dr. Owen was slated for Burt Lancaster (later Heston would replace Lancaster on a far more prestigious and bigger-budgeted film, the 1959 Ben-Hur), but when Lancaster turned it down Columbia head Harry Cohn slashed the budget and borrowed Heston from his home studio, Paramount, for this one film. Bad for Each Other was a box-office flop – audiences probably thought they’d seen it before, and effectively they had – despite Columbia’s attempt to sell it as an exposé film about “ghost doctors,” young M.D.’s who actually perform surgeries but let older and more prestigious doctors take the credit. The phrase “ghost doctor” actually appears in the dialogue, but only once, and that’s hardly the main issue of the film!