Medical melodrama

The Bramble Bush (1960) isn't strictly a medical melodrama, but it combines medical and legal drama with the small-town-with-secrets drama so popular in the wake of Peyton Place. Richard Burton plays a doctor who returns to his hometown at the request of a childhood friend who is suffering and near death, with the idea that he would attend to his friend, which puts him at odds with the friend's father. The local hospital administrator agrees to the proposed plan but the friend deteriorates so badly that he begs Burton to end it for him, which he ultimately does with an overdose of morphine. At this point, the legal drama kicks into gear, as well as some romantic melodrama vis-a-vis the friend's wife (Barbara Rush), whom the friend wanted to end up with Burton after his death. To complicate things, nurse Angie Dickinson has a yen for Burton but some past mistakes catch up with her and keep her out of the running. Lots going on. It's a potboiler, but with some thoughtfully delineated performances to redeem it. Not great, but definitely worth a look. It doesn't show up often (hadn't seen it since the old AMC days), but there's finally a decent print on YouTube.

The Young Doctors (1961) has a familiar plot involving a new doctor on the staff (Ben Gazzara) who clashes with the older head of the department (Frederick March) over protocol and diagnoses. It's nothing groundbreaking but it packs quite a bit into one movie, with subplots involving other staff members. (It was based on a book by Arthur Hailey, who specialized in telling multiple stories under one roof.) I first saw it because of Dick Clark, who was trying for an acting career at the time, but I guess American Bandstand fans weren't enough to make it happen. He played an intern whose wife was undergoing a medical crisis, which made it very personal for his character when she was misdiagnosed by March. But, as I said, it's somewhat standard and I'd call it minor rather than major.

There was also a window of public fascination with psychiatry and a couple of films dealt with it in a hospital setting. The Caretakers (1963) featured Robert Stack and Joan Crawford as two doctors on staff with conflicting theories of treatment, with Crawford being entirely traditional and Stack leaning toward more progressive theories like group therapy, with the patients (and hospital administrator Herbert Marshall) caught in between. (Vincente Minnelli's The Cobweb (1955) featured a similar plotline, with individual patient's stories taking place within the framework of administrative conflicts.) In The Caretakers there's a fairly strong group of supporting players, featuring Diane McBain, Janis Paige, Polly Bergen, Constance Ford, Ellen Corby and Sharon Hugueny, who disappeared from films quickly but whom I always found to be an engaging actress, particularly in Parrish (1961), where she played Karl Malden's daughter who befriended the son (Troy Donahue) of his rival.



The same year Samuel Fuller wrote and directed Shock Corridor, about a journalist who finagled a diagnosis of insanity so that he could investigate a murder inside a similar institution. In keeping with Fuller's style it's more ludid and sensationalized and the patients are all "types" you'd expect to find in a movie which puts story over substance. It has a better reputation than I'm making allowances for and I was surprised to learn that it's now part of The National Film Registry at The Library of Congress (and also a Criterion release). Personally, I put Samuel Fuller more on the so-bad-it's-good side of the ledger, but that's an opinion not everyone shares.