The People vs. Dr. Kildare (MGM, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I searched the Turner Classic Movies Web page and found two quite interesting movies. One was a 1941 entry in the MGM Dr Kildare series called The People vs. Dr. Kildare, seventh of the nine movies made during the late 1930’s and early 1940’s before the U.S. was attacked by Japanese forces at Pearl Harbor and the series' star, Lew Ayres, wrecked his own career overnight by declaring himself a conscientious objector and refusing to be drafted into the military. Ironically, given the role he’d just been playing, he did volunteer to serve as an Army medic, which put him in as much front-line danger as actually fighting (if not more so, since he wasn’t armed and therefore couldn’t fight back), but when the war ended he was relegated to working in independent productions like Olivia de Havilland’s The Dark Mirror (of which James Agee said that he wished he could have been as proud of Ayres’ service after the war as he was during it) and his career never regained its former luster. (Then again, as my husband Charles pointed out, Lew Ayres had begun his career at the top – as Greta Garbo’s leading man in her last silent film, The Kiss, and then the lead in the high-prestige anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front – and so he had nowhere to go but down.) The ironies about the Dr. Kildare series continued with MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer’s choice of director: Harold S. Bucquet, who despite the excellence with which he staged the films’ medical sequences was a hard-core Christian Scientist who refused all medical attention himself. Katharine Hepburn thought Bucquet was a potentially great director and insisted on using him for his “A” feature Without Love, co-starring Spencer Tracy, but at the close of that production Bucquet developed appendicitis. Hepburn, being the kind of no-B.S. person she was, pleaded with him to go to the hospital and be operated on, but Bucquet held fast to his Christian Science principles and died all too young from it.

The People vs. Dr. Kildare begins promisingly with ice-skating star Frances Marlowe (Bonita Granville) involved in an auto accident with a truck driver just as her manager has negotiated a deal with her for three times the money she’d been making. Dr. Janes Kildare (Lew Ayres) just happens to come along when, on a date with his fiancée, Nurse Mary Lamont (Laraine Day), he happens to witness the accident and performs an emergency operation to repair Frances’ ruptured spleen because she’d die if he waited for the ambulance to arrive, The operation seems to be a success except that Frances’ leg is paralyzed, and she and her manager hire attorney Mr. Reynolds (Paul Stanton) to sue Drs. Kildare and his supervisor, Dr. Leonard Gillespie (Lionel Barrymore, playing his part from a wheelchair because by then his chronic arthritis had become so bad he really needed one), along with Blair General Hospital where they both work. There is a lot of comic relief in this movie, and much of it comes from Red Skelton, billed sixth and cast as an orderly while waiting for bigger and funnier roles to come. Also a surprise in the cast list is Tom Conway as the attorney hired by Blair General to defend their case, though he isn’t used as creatively here as he was in the Val Lewton unit at RKO (where he got to work in vest-pocket masterpieces like Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim). Still, Conway (like his more famous brother, George Sanders – Tom changed his last name to avoid coasting on his brother’s fame) projects a much-needed aura of urbanity to the courtroom sequences, in which the height of the movie is Lionel Barrymore’s visible frustration at the way courtroom procedure prevents him from just talking to the jury and getting the point across that, while it’s too bad that Frances is paralyzed, neither he nor Kildare had anything to do with it.

Eventually I was startled that the writers – Max Brand (who created Dr. Kildare in the first place even though he was otherwise known mostly for Westerns) and Lawrence R. Bachmann, story; and Willis Goldman and Harry Ruskin, script – ended the story: Kildare seeks out the truck driver involved in the original accident and the driver tells him that Frances seemed paralyzed even before he crashed into her car. From this, he and Gillespie deduce that she suffered from spina bifida occulta, Latin for “:hidden soft spine” and a nascent condition that could have been triggered by a recent fall while Frances was skating. The jury foreman suggests that either Frances will go through an operation or they will award her damages if the surgery doesn’t work, and in the final scene Frances, post-op, shows off her skill on roller skates and is back to normal. The People vs. Dr. Kildare is an engaging film, even though I’ve never been that big a fan of medical dramas and the only other Kildare film I’ve seen is the first one, Internes Can’t Take Money, made at Paramount in 1937 and featuring Joel McCrea as Kildare and top-billed Barbara Stanwyck (my favorite all-time actress of the classic period, with a versatility matched by none of her contemporaries and only Meryl Streep since) as a young ex-con whom McCrea helps to find her child. I especially loved the courtroom scenes, in which the opposing attorneys are good buddies outside the courtroom and the judge is an old college chum of the plaintiff’s lawyer; this is characteristic of real-life trials and makes a lot of people wonder, “Just what side is my lawyer on, anyway?”