MARY STEVENS, M.D. (1933)

Some sources describe this pre-Code soap opera as being about a woman's struggle to become a doctor, but that's all over with by the beginning of the film. Kay Francis is the title doctor, who graduates with good friend Lyle Talbot; they go into practice together, but his drinking gets the better of him and after she saves his ass by operating for him when he's smashed, they go their separate ways (even though she's in love with him). Talbot marries a woman whose father is politically powerful and he gets tangled up in some shady affairs. Francis sets up a successful pediatric practice with Glenda Farrell (whose character's name is Glenda Carroll--an inside joke?). Francis and Talbot meet up again (she's on vacation, he's running from a potential scandal), become lovers, and Francis bears a child out of wedlock. Her child soon dies from an infantile paralysis epidemic on board a ship and she considers suicide--can Talbot or Farrell bring her back to her senses? The most interesting thing here is the matter-of-factness with which Francis tells Farrell that she's going ahead and having her baby. It's seen as a positive thing, but a year later, under the Code crackdown, this spin would not have been possible. Una O'Connor is a shipboard mother; Thelma Todd is Talbot's wife. Sidney Miller has a small role as a Jewish teenager whose depression over the state of the world is played for laughs, as Woody Allen would do years later in ANNIE HALL. Francis gets a Bride of Frankenstein streak of white in her hair after her baby's death. She and Talbot are fine, but it's the subject matter that kept me watching. [TCM].