The Cinema
"Men in 'White." At the Empire Tuts is an American film version of the American play now running in London. Not having seen the play, I cannot draw comparisons, but the film is a dramatic piece of work which might have been more convincing if the Censor had not inter- vened. The atmosphere of an American hospital is vividly sketched in—the glittering corridors and polished surfaces, the loud-speaking telephones which keep calling the name of a wanted doctor through the building, the formidable efficiency of the whole aseptic routine. All this is just right for operations, when the patient, surrounded by unrecognizably masked figures, lies in a death-like condition on a sterilized table, but what will be the effect of so much triumphant mechanism on the doctors' thoughts ? Will they find it easy to keep alive the imagination necessary for relating laboratory findings to the behaviour of individual human beings ? How- ever, the object of Men in White is not to raise these questions but to dramatize the conflict between a young doctor's ambi- tions and the demands of his fiancee (Myrna Loy), a wealthy, spoilt young woman who wants him to give up his post- graduate studies and settle down to regular practice. This part of the plot is well handled, but when the young doctor, overworked and worried by his fiancee's exactions, has a brief affair with a pretty young nurse, with the eventual result that the nurse is brought into the hospital suffering from a septic miscarriage—then the influence of the Censor is apparent and probabilities are severely strained.
Miss Elizabeth Allan gives a good performance as the nurse, but Clark Gable is not very well cast as the doctor, and the best acting comes from Jean Hersholt as the fatherly surgeon who thinks that love-making has no business to interfere with research.
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