Not As a Stranger (Stanley Kramer Motion Pictures, United Artists, 1955)

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

After watching Odds Against Tomorrow on November 20 I kept on Turner Classic Movies for Not As a Stranger, a truly odd 1955 medical melodrama starring Olivia de Havilland, Robert Mitchum and Frank Sinatra (billed in that order even though Mitchum’s character is clearly the lead) based on a novel by Morton Thompson. I remember seeing the Ernest Hemingway home in Havana in December 1977 – the Cuban government has maintained it as a museum – and seeing Not As a Stranger on his bookshelf, I was momentarily surprised that he’d have such a trashy novel (I hadn’t read it – and still haven’t – but its reputation is as a potboiler) on his shelf. Not As a Stranger was bought as a movie by producer Stanley Kramer before the book was even published, and though he’d made a number of films as producer for both United Artists (Champion, Home of the Brave, High Noon) and Columbia (Death of a Salesman, The Wild One and the bizarre cult classic The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.), for this one Kramer decided to direct it himself as well. (He would remain a producer/director for the remaining quarter-century of his career.) The plot deals with aspiring doctors Lucas Marsh (Robert Mitchum) and Alfred Boone (Frank Sinatra) in their years at medical school and then as young, aspiring doctors. Their principal teacher is Dr. Aarons (Broderick Crawford, who in the first half steals the movie out from under both of them), who begins the class by starting the dissection of a human with a lecture that until a few days before this was a living, breathing person with a soul. Now all that’s left of them is a corpse, and he bids his class to study attentively out of respect for the person whose soul once inhabited that body.

Lucas and Alfred end up as roommates, only Lucas is financially broke – his alcoholic gambler father has run through the money that was supposed to get him through medical school. Desperate for a way to come up with the tuition for his next term, he starts romancing nurse Kristina Hedvigson (Olivia de Havilland), who comes from a Swedish immigrant family – her parents are Henry Morgan and Virginia Christine, and not only does it try our suspension of belief big-time that Henry Morgan (born April 10, 1915) could have sired Olivia de Havilland (born July 1, 1916), the entire family speaks in some of the worst faux-”Swedish” accents of all time (rivaling George F. Marion as Greta Garbo’s father in the 1930 Anna Christie – though at least they don’t have the competition of a real Swede in the cast!). Lucas gets a dinner invitation from the Hedvigsons and Kristina announces that she’s got several thousand dollars saved up – and immediately Lucas decides to court her and ultimately marry her even though he’s not in love with her. He even does the usual faux-galant thing of waiting for her to suggest to him that she use her savings to bail him out. There’s a marvelous scene in which Boone and all the other doctors-to-be (including a young Lee Marvin) are talking excitedly about their plans to establish big-city practices and make themselves tons of money, while Lucas virtuously insists he’s going to move upstate to the farming community of Greenville and practice there. Lucas gets a job as assistant to Dr. Runkleman (Charles Bickford) and lives a catch-as-catch-can existence; in one nicely amusing scene we see Kristina roasting a chicken the Marshes got in lieu of cash from a local farmer he treated.

Alas, Lucas falls into the clutches of “bad girl” Harriet Lang (Gloria Grahame) and starts an affair with her – represented by a shot of a white stallion chasing after a black mare, in the sort of pretentious symbolism directors had to use to symbolize erotic attraction in the Production Code era – and when Kristina figures it out, she’s ready to leave him even though the town is in the middle of a typhoid epidemic and Lucas is also working on a mass vaccination campaign (with no public resistance, surprising in our modern era when millions of Americans have become convinced that vaccinations are a threat to their autonomy and freedom). Ultimately Dr. Runkleman has a heart attack and Lucas takes over the operation – and blows it, leading to Runkleman’s death. The experience also humbles him enough that he returns to Kristina and she inexplicably forgives him. It’s also been established that Kristina is pregnant – though one wonders how since not only were she and Lucas sleeping in the Code-obligatory twin beds, he was away from home so often for either medical emergencies or trysts with Harriet we wonder just when he and Kristina had time to have sex – and if they broke up she’d have had to raise the baby as a single parent and return to work as a nurse to earn the money to do so.

The American Medical Association opposed the filming of Not As a Stranger and pleaded with Kramer to make sure his writers, Edward Anhalt and his wife Edna, included scenes making the point that most doctors were dedicated, selfless professionals concerned only with the welfare of their patients – though that’s not the impression we get from the film, in which most of the doctors are depicted either as political hacks (the head of surgery at the hospital that services Greenfield, Dr. Snyder [Myron McCormick], is an appointee way out of his depth in the job) or money-grubbing assholes. What works about Not As a Stranger is the quiet strength of the acting of Mitchum and Sinatra in the male leads. Everything else, from Kramer’s serviceable direction to the awful Swedish accents and the miscasting of Olivia de Havilland (who was not only 20 years too old for her part, she was totally wrong as a “type”), sort-of works but not well enough to achieve true greatness (or even goodness; I once wrote of a later Kramer film, Ship of Fools, “It aspires to greatness and achieves goodness,” but simple goodness would have been an improvement for Not As a Stranger). Not As a Stranger is the sort of movie that alternates between genuinely moving scenes and utter tripe, and though James Van Heusen and Buddy Kaye wrote a theme song for the film and Frank Sinatra recorded it as a single for Capitol, it’s not heard in the movie – not even under the opening credits – nor does its melody have anything to do with the background music George Antheil (former “bad boy” of French music turned respectable Hollywood composer) wrote for the film’s score. What’s more, the Anhalts’ script never explains what the title means or how it relates to the film.