MEN IN WHITE (1934)

Fitfully remembered for DEAD END (filmed in ’37) and not much else, is it possible that Sidney Kingsley is America’s most influential playwright? Well, maybe . . . in a way. MEN IN WHITE, his Pulitzer Prize winning debut, turns out to be the template for decades of radio & tv medical drama. (With minimal changes you could film this script for a fresh episode of THE GOOD DOCTOR tomorrow.) And about a decade later, Kingsley did similar service for serial cop shows with DETECTIVE STORY (filmed in 1951 by William Wyler, who’d also done DEAD END). The surprise is that after decades of trope abuse & repetition in thousands of prime time hours, this fast, glitzy reduction of the hit Group Theater B’way production (still running when the film opened*) comes across with its emotions fresh, its comic relief sharp and its human complications raw. Clark Gable steps past his manly brute characters to play a striving young interne hoping to fulfill his potential with further study in Vienna and more years mentored by brilliant surgeon Jean Hersholt. But can High Society fiancée Myrna Loy stand the wait? Especially after lonely nurse Elizabeth Allan takes a fall with Gable one exhausted night. Loaded with little dramas as staff & patients dash around a stupendous Art Deco hospital design, underrated director Richard Boleslawski ignores M-G-M house style with dynamic pacing, showy camera moves (George Folsey lensed), even touches of Soviet style film editing. It’s some show, even if a few clunker lines betray its age. And worth a look simply to see how they finesse a botched abortion into the narrative only months before the Hollywood Production Code came down hard.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Film reviewers complained that the play was fileted down from ensemble piece to Clark Gable vehicle. (On stage, the biggest star was the realistic operating room & surgery sequence.) But what an ensemble The Group Theatre gave stage director Lee Strasberg: Sanford Meisner, Clifford Odets, Luther Adler, Robert Lewis, Morris Carnovsky, Elia Kazan among its cast of 27. (And probably Sidney Lumet if he hadn’t quit The Group in disgust at the crap version of the Stanislawski/Method that held sway under Strasberg. Something he could have discussed with this film’s director as Boleslawski came to the States as part of Stanislawski’s legendary Moscow Art Theatre Company.)