After hitting Hollywood top-tier on his first two leads (CAPTAIN BLOOD/’35; CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE/’36), Warner Bros. let Errol Flynn skip action to play sacrificial surgeon in this adaptation of a Lloyd C. Douglas novel. Even without swash & buckle, Flynn’s fine; everything else the problem. (The film, BTW, commercially very successful.) Retracing a similar path between medicine & religion he’d walked in MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION (1935; ‘54), Douglas has rising young surgeon Flynn needlessly take the blame for an operation gone wrong, before meeting-cute with grieving daughter Anita Louise. A get-together arranged by nurse Margaret Lindsay (long in love with the good doctor) and by the expired patient’s favored radio pastor Cedric Hardwicke. (He’s really Norman Vincent Peale . . . with polio. Yikes!*) Meantime, Flynn’s hospital pal Walter Abel has gone West in search of a cure or vaccine for deadly ‘Spotted Fever,’ his lonely posting a perfect hideaway for Flynn to lick his wounds after resigning his post rather than tell on another doctor. (And if you think Flynn doesn’t nobly test his new vaccine on himself, you’ve got another think coming.) Warners laid on decent production value and top talent in cast & crew, but director Frank Borzage, a seriously religious Catholic, probably believed this stuff a little too well to pull the melodrama out of the fire. Flynn would have better straight dramatic innings ahead, especially in the latter part of his short career*, and of course, was nonpareil in the swashbucklers that kept so many from noting just how damn good he was in just about anything thrown his way.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *ROCKY MOUNTAIN/’50 is a fine example of Flynn’s unexpected dramatic heft toward the end of his Warners contract days. So too, his run of timely WWII pics. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/06/rocky-mountain-1950.html
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Peale famous for ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’; for decades of weekly sermons broadcast from NYC’s Marble Collegiate Church (29 th & Fifth); and most beloved for taking down Milton Berle when he went on early television against him. Oh, and for campaigning against Adlai Stevenson as a divorced man and against Kennedy for being Catholic.
