Two Pre-Code Doctors

MEN IN WHITE (1934) has Clark Gable as a promising intern who is torn between continuing to work long hours with his mentor (Jean Hersholt) and spending more time with his socialite finacee (Myrna Loy). Gable may have served as the archetype for many of the movie doctors who came later: he's charming and handsome, and when there's a conflict between him and an older, more established doctor (in this movie, the sinister C. Henry Gordon), the younger doctor is always right. When duty calls and Gable breaks a dinner date, Loy gives him the cold shoulder and Gable finds a night of comfort in the arms of an understanding nurse (Elizabeth Allan). Later, the pregnant and single Allan falls ill, Gable cannot save her, and Loy realizes she must give him up to his career. The film is well directed, especially Allan's hospital bed death scene and Gable's confrontation with Gordon; Gable is quite good, as he usually was in his 30's movies, though it’s a shame that Loy doesn't have more to do. Wallace Ford is a frivolous intern and Otto Kruger is an older doctor whose wife is dying of TB. There's a very nice art deco hospital office that looks like it belongs in an Astaire/Rogers musical. The movie was released just a few months before the Production Code was enforced. Most sources say that the movie runs 80 minutes, but the print that TCM shows is apparently a re-release version, running 75 minutes, with at least one obvious trim; at one point, an intern says, "We should eat, drink, and make merry," and there's a cut to a woman answering a telephone, saying, "This is Mary speaking," but her line has been erased in the TCM print. One bawdy line that made it through is an intern's complaint: "That's the trouble with love--it ruins your sex life." The plight of the pregnant nurse is unclear; we have to guess from the coded language that she's pregnant, and it’s not clear at all what she dies of. [TCM]

THE SIN OF MADELON CLAUDET (1931) isn't strictly speaking a doctor movie (though Jean Hersholt once again plays a doctor), but a melodrama from the well-worn "suffering mother" genre. Helen Hayes is the title character, whom we first see as a young French girl who leaves the countryside for Paris with American Neil Hamilton; he goes back to the States to attend to family business and never returns; Hayes has a baby and tries to get farmer Alan Hale to marry her, but he doesn't want to be burdened with a child. She is befriended by older friend Lewis Stone and spends some time in decent conditions as a kept woman, but it turns out that Stone is a notorious jewel thief and when he's caught, he kills himself and she gets 10 years in jail as an accomplice. When released, she becomes a petty thief and a streetwalker, sending as much money as she can to her child, being raised in a orphanage. Years later, the son (Robert Young) is a successful doctor. Hayes, ill and aged beyond her years, has been keeping track of his progress and when their paths cross, he doesn't recognize her, though he does arrange for her to get medical attention. The story is told as a flashback by Hersholt to Young's fiancee (Karen Morley) who has been behaving like Myrna Loy, but she sees things in a new light and decides to stand by her man, even though Young still doesn't know that kindly old Hayes is his mother. It's a creaky and predictable plot, a variation of which is used in the more popular MADAME X, and its short length and episodic nature work against it, but Hayes is worth seeing. Cliff Edwards and Charles Winninger have small supporting roles, and the underrated child actor Frankie Darro is Hayes' son as a boy. [TCM]