Crisis (MGM, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, August 16) Turner Classic Movies was doing one of their “Summer Under the Stars” tributes, a full day of films featuring a major star. In this case the star was Cary Grant and the film my husband Charles and I ended up seeing was an unusual one on his résumé: Crisis, a Latin American-set melodrama from 1950 written and directed by Richard Brooks from a story called “The Doubters” by George Tabori (who co-wrote with Paul Anthelme the play Our Two Consciences, on which Alfred Hitchcock based his underrated 1953 film I Confess). In Crisis, Grant stars as super-brain surgeon Dr. Eugene Ferguson, on vacation in an unnamed (and fictitious; an opening disclaimer explains, “The time is now. The scene of the action is fictitious, but the forces at play in this story are not fictitious”) South American country obviously modeled on Juan Perón’s Argentina with his wife Helen (Paula Raymond, cast after Nancy Davis – later Mrs. Ronald Reagan – either turned it down or was rejected). Dr. Ferguson and his wife unfortunately turn up in this unnamed South American country just as the nation’s dictator, Raoul Farrago (José Ferrer, billed second under Grant and the only other actor whose name appears before the title), is suffering from a brain tumor and needs immediate surgery. There’s also a revolution being led by Roland Gonzalez (Gilbert Roland) that’s on the point of overthrowing Farrago, and an American oil company executive named Sam Proctor (Leon Ames) who represents himself as the real authority representing the U.S. The implication is that he’s willing to deal with whoever is in charge no matter how the revolution turns out. Farrago has a forbidding wife named Isabel (Signe Hasso, who was reportedly cast because of her strong resemblance to Evita Perón), a mother who lurks around (Soledad Jiménez) and speaks no English and very little Spanish, and a military adviser named Col. Adragon (Ramon Novarro) who has the Fergusons kidnapped so the world’s greatest brain surgeon can perform the operation needed to save Farrago’s life.

Dr. Ferguson agrees to perform the surgery after first trying to talk the Farragos and Col. Adragon into allowing the dictator to be flown to a state-of-the-art hospital either in the U.S. or in neighboring Chile. Raoul refuses to leave the country for fear that in his absence, the revolutionaries will exploit the power vacuum and take over. Instead he insists that the operation be performed in the presidential palace, and Dr. Ferguson orders Farrago’s aides to recruit two other doctors, two nurses and a general assistant and stock the presidential bedroom with the equipment needed for the surgery. Dr. Ferguson also stages elaborate rehearsals for the operation with a dummy head representing Farrago’s own, and in one of the film’s most chilling moments Farrago watches one of the rehearsals, sees Dr. Ferguson throw away the dummy head, and asks how he did. “The operation was a great success, but you died,” Dr. Ferguson tells him. Raoul Farrago is hardly a model patient; he’s used to giving orders, not taking them. Richard Brooks, making his directorial debut (he’d just written a screenplay for a Clark Gable film, Any Number Can Play, and that had been such a hit he was given the chance to direct his next script), ramps up the tension and fills the soundtrack with Spanish without offering us subtitles (fortunately Charles, who’s tri-lingual in English, Spanish, and Esperanto, understood a good deal of it). I’d seen Crisis before in the mid-1970’s and it seemed silly, mainly because it wasn’t easy to accept Cary Grant as a brain surgeon (before he was cast in the role it was considered for Spencer Tracy, though since Tracy looked older than Grant even though they were contemporaries – Tracy was born April 5, 1900 and Grant January 18, 1904 – his version would have cast Dr. Ferguson as a widower touring South America with his young-adult daughter). I’m also pretty sure Charles and I had seen it together at least once before, but this time around I liked it a lot better than on my previous go-rounds.

Like a handful of Grant’s other films, including None But the Lonely Heart (1944) and his previous foray into South American intrigue, Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), Crisis certainly stretches him considerably more than the romantic comedies he usually made. It’s still a bit hard to accept him as a brain surgeon (despite the coaching he got from a real-life brain surgeon, Dr. Tracy Putnam), but he’s quite good as the man in the middle, caught between Farrago’s will and the revolutionaries’ determination to overthrow him. At one point the Fergusons go out to a nightclub with Sam Proctor that turns out to be a hotbed for the revolutionaries. They meet guitarist Cariago (Vicente Gómez, whose solo guitar is heard through much of the soundtrack in a gimmick director Brooks admitted he borrowed from Anton Karas’s famous zither scoring in Carol Reed’s The Third Man), who as a matter of principle refuses to play in his native country while Farrago is still its ruler. Reluctantly he agrees to play for the Americans, and then suddenly a detachment of Farrago’s secret police storms into the club, holds everyone at gunpoint, and threatens to start arresting people. Ferguson says if they arrest anybody else they’ll have to arrest him, too, since he was doing whatever everyone else in the club was doing. Knowing that Farrago is depending on Ferguson’s medical skills to save his life, they give up. Ultimately the operation takes place and it’s a success, sort of, but Farrago insists on violating doctor’s orders and taking personal charge of the last-ditch resistance at the presidential palace. The military switches sides and joins the revolution, Farrago dies as a result of his exertions in his weakened state, the revolutionaries invade the palace and shoot down Farrago’s wife, and then the revolutionary leader Gonzalez announces that he’s going to rule the way Farrago did.

Gonzalez is shot in the back by a disillusioned revolutionary and pleads with Dr. Ferguson to help him, which he refuses because he’s just seen the cycle play out and doesn’t want to be part of it anymore. Instead he and his wife, who was kidnapped earlier by the revolutionaries who held her hostage and sent a note to Dr. Ferguson that she would be killed if Farrago survived the operation (Mrs. Farrago intercepted the letter and burned it so Dr. Ferguson wouldn’t see it and would go through the operation as planned), are reunited and successfully flee the country. Crisis seems all too relevant today, especially now that the U.S., hailed in the script as a worldwide beacon of freedom, is ruled by a Farrago-style megalomaniac with his own private police forces, ostensibly to deal with immigration (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE; and Customs and Border Protection, or CBP) but really to arrest and sometimes kill anyone who crosses their path and says or does something Dear Leader doesn’t like. Crisis was made in the middle of the so-called McCarthy era and it’s amazing how much liberal political content Brooks got into the film, not only in terms of its depiction of life under an authoritarian crazy but the anti-capitalist strain in the portrayal of Sam Proctor, who’s willing to deal with any central government as long as it protects his company’s precious investment in extracting its oil. Brooks said later he encountered a lot of resistance on the set from more experienced behind-the-camera personnel, including cinematographer Ray June and art department head Cedric Gibbons, and he suspected it was deliberate when a camera crane ran over Brooks’s foot. Brooks refused to leave the set to seek medical attention for fear MGM would use that as an excuse to replace him, but Grant protected his job by announcing to Brooks and all within earshot, “You’re my director on this film, and that’s that!” Though it was a box-office flop on its initial release, partly because audiences had a hard time accepting Cary Grant as the world’s greatest brain surgeon and partly because Mexico and most other Latin American countries banned it, Crisis actually holds up well today and is an intriguing outlier in Grant’s career.