G | 1 h 50 min | Romantic Comedy | 1951
Screenwriter-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s tongue-in-cheek film has a hard time taking itself seriously, opening as it does with the comically self-conscious line, “This will be part of the story of Noah Praetorius, M.D. That is not his real name, of course …”
The winsome, if enigmatic, Dr. Praetorius (Cary Grant) uses unconventional techniques to cure. His more conventional, less recognized colleagues envy him. Instead of emulating him, as they should, they seek to discredit him. Led by the devilishly dogged professor Rodney Elwell (Hume Cronyn), they try to turn his friendship with the equally enigmatic Mr. Shunderson (Finlay Currie) against him. Cornered but cocksure, Praetorius doesn’t do himself favors by falling in love with a fetching female patient of his, Deborah (Jeanne Crain).
An aged bed-ridden patient sighs: “It’s not much fun when you get to be old.”
Praetorius, checking her pulse: “It’s less fun if you don’t get to be old.”
Mankiewicz’s jibes about health and sickness are three-pronged. First, through Praetorius’s enviable record with patients, he pays serious tribute to doctors who focus as much on a healthy spirit as they do on a healthy body. Second, through Elwell’s inimical inquisition into Praetorius’s reputation, he takes a comical swipe at quacks preying on gullible folk. Finally, through Praetorius, Mankiewicz wisecracks about doctors so obsessed with disease and profiting off it that they hurry through treatment without holistic diagnosis, cementing patient dependence instead of doing the opposite.
Praetorius’s former housekeeper, Sarah Pickett, and her aside against conversing behind “closed doors,” spoofs those who unjustly accuse the reputable of impropriety. Prime-accuser Elwell’s name seems a play on the phrase “ill will,” typical of wags who cast aspersions in bad faith. And Praetorius’s first name is a play on the biblical “Noah,” who was also roundly mocked.
The Imperceptible Human Spirit
Praetorius believes that patients are sick people whose feeding, bathing, and resting routines must be inspired by what’s best for their recovery. They’re not “inmates” whose routines can be toyed with to suit busybody doctors and nurses. He parrots Deborah’s absent-minded epithet for him (“pompous know-it-all”) hinting first that, if he’s pompous, he isn’t a know-it-all, and second, that the latter descriptor fits others in his profession quite snugly.“The human body is not necessarily the human being,” Praetorius tells medical students. Understanding bone, muscle, and tissue from months of cadaver-cutting in classrooms may tell all about the body but little about the person. Personhood is expressed in love, hate, desire, hope, despair, memory. And sensitivity to a patient’s personhood is what eludes even revered doctors.
Praetorius is gifted enough to also conduct the university orchestra. One scene has him comically correcting bass-player friend Prof. Barker (Walter Slezak) to play in step with his baton and the rest of the orchestra, rather than merely as soloist. It echoes his earlier allusion to a soul that, like it or not, harmonizes body parts no matter how proficient they are individually.
What’s Praetorius saying about the world of syringes, serums, and syrups? The imperceptible human spirit holds sway over the obvious body. But doctors who don’t appreciate the orchestral analogy with Barker shouldn’t be so surprised when they treat body parts in isolation and end up with dysfunctional, if not downright suicidal, humans. Deborah’s attempted suicide is more than a plot device.
Praetorius smirks, “The nerve of some doctors, giving people up for lost, as though they’d found them in the first place.”
The film satirizes willful defamation much like “Meet John Doe” and “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.” The masses shower love on a mysterious, caring figure, and then a mischievous minority abruptly brands him a fraud.
Some of Mankiewicz’s meandering scenes (around toy trains, or Deborah’s uncle and his farm) come off as camp. But his lines are otherwise sharp, thoughtful, and wry, especially when voiced by the charming, classy Grant, not a cuff out of place, even during a frenzied session conducting Brahms’s “Gaudeamus igitur.”
A nurse, finding Praetorius lost in thought, asks if he’s all right. He dismisses it at his “usual twilight sadness” and wonders, poetically, if it ever struck her that days die as people do: battling for every last moment of light before they give up to the dark.
