The Physician at the Movies

The physician at the movies Peter E. Dans, MD Richard Widmark New Orleans trying to prevent an outbreak of bubonic plague (December 25, 1914 to in Panic in the Streets,1 a prosecutor in Judgment at Nuremberg, March 24, 2008) and a police detective in Madigan, never resonated as well ichard Widmark was born in with the public. They much preferred roles in which Widmark Sunrise, Minnesota, where radiated callousness and moral obtuseness, as in The Bedford WadeR Olson, a construction Incident and the two films reviewed here, Coma,2 and No worker, opened a museum in his Way Out,2 in which he plays a megalomaniacal doctor and a honor in 2002. Widmark’s fa- malevolent racist. The contrast with Widmark’s real persona ther was a traveling salesman, is striking, attesting to his extraordinary and vastly underrated and his family moved five times acting ability. before he was six, during which time Widmark bonded with his References brother. After graduating from 1. Dans PE. The Physician at the Movies. Pharos Winter 2002; Lake Forest College, he took a bicycle tour of Germany with 65: 49–50. a friend the year before Hitler invaded Poland. Refused per- 2. Dans PE. Doctors in the Movies: Boil the Water and Just Say mission to visit Dachau, where political prisoners were being Aah! Bloomington (IL): Medi-Ed Press; 2000. kept, he gained entry to a Youth Camp, where he filmed Nazi indoctrination. On returning to America, he gave talks using the footage, but they generated little interest. Nonetheless, the public speaking experience convinced him to study acting rather than the law and served him well as an actor in radio and on the Broadway stage. With the onset of World War II, he tried to enlist but was rejected three times because of a perforated eardrum. His brother served as pilot and was shot down over Holland and became a POW. After his repatriation, he became increas- ingly ill and died ten years later, which devastated Widmark. Described as “quiet, thoughtful and well-read,” Widmark hardly ever drank. He married his Lake Forest classmate Jean Hazelwood, the only girl he said, in a phrase that seems sadly dated, he ever “went steady with.” Happily married for fifty-five years, he cared for her in the years before her death in 1997 of Alzheimer’s Disease. He established the Jean and Richard Widmark Foundation, which has funded Alzheimer’s Genevieve Bujold in Coma. © MGM Credit: MGM/Photofest. and cancer research, environmental conservation, and efforts against handgun violence and the use of nuclear weapons, and he donated land and a one-room schoolhouse for preservation Coma (1978) in his adopted hometown of Roxbury, Connecticut. Starring Genevieve Bujold, Richard Widmark, and Michael Ironically, this universally acclaimed “nice guy” is most Douglas. identified with his first screen role as psychopathic killer Directed by Michael Crichton. Rated PG. Running time 113 Tommy Udo in the 1947 film noir Kiss of Death. An ex-con, minutes. Udo tears out an electrical cord and ties Ma Rizzo (Mildred Dunnock), the mother of an informant or “squealer” into her ased on a novel by fellow Columbia P&S graduate Robin wheelchair and, while baring his teeth and giggling, pushes Cook, and directed by Harvard Medical School gradu- her down a flight of stairs. The role garnered him his only ateB Michael Crichton, this farfetched but entertaining thriller Oscar nomination and led to other “bad guy” roles in makes up technologically for what it lacks in humanity and noir films like Pickup on South Street and Night and passion. Genevieve Bujold plays Dr. Susan Wheeler, a surgical the City. This led James Agee, the author and resident intent on uncovering the reason for the high rate of film critic, to say of Widmark, “Murder is one unexplained postoperative coma in relatively healthy young of the kindest things he is capable of.” people undergoing elective surgery. Wheeler is nothing like The “good guy” roles, which he sought, most of the previous women doctors in film, as she parks her such as a whaler in Down to the Sea red convertible in front of Boston Memorial Hospital and runs in Ships, a public health officer in to rounds. She has a mind of her own and is making it in a 36 The Pharos/Summer 2008 man’s specialty on the basis of talent, hard work, and guts. talking to the governor, a United States senator, the president, The men don’t seem to have changed, though. Even her sur- and the secretary of the Department of Health, Education, gical resident boyfriend, Dr. Mark Bellows (Michael Douglas), and Welfare (now Health and Human Services). Harris tells patronizes her. Bellows, who is angling for the chief residency Wheeler to cool it, saying, “I can protect you because you’re in surgery, is caught up in hospital politics. When they return good and, frankly, because you’re a woman.” After she leaves, to their apartment, she refuses to get him a beer and to make he says, “Women! Christ!” his dinner. “Get your own beer,” she says, as she proceeds to take the first shower. Bellows mutters, “That’s what I get for be- Stop reading here if you decide to see the film! coming involved with a goddamned doctor. I should have fallen in love with a nurse. Dorothy on the eighth floor liked me.” Bellows is instructed to take her away for a weekend on Bellows starts whining about not getting respect, and Wheeler Cape Cod to get her under control. After the requisite love- tells him, “You don’t want a lover, you want a goddamned making, they head back to Boston, but she can’t resist visit- wife,” and walks out of the apartment. The next day at aerobic ing the Jefferson Institute, where the coma patients are sent dancing, she trades confidences with her best friend, pregnant after discharge from the acute hospital. Bellows inexplicably from an extramarital affair and scheduled for a first trimester stays in the car as she enters this forbidding place. Of course “therapeutic abortion” listed as a routine D&C. if he had gone in, the movie would have been a lot shorter. As they prepare for the operation, the doctors talk about There, Wheeler learns that the bodies are in suspended journal articles and the stock market; the nurses discuss their animation, monitored by a computer attached to various lines. plans for the weekend and other personal matters. There is an Adjustments in vital signs, feeding, and handling of excretion excellent sequence involving a Dr. George (Rip Torn) instruct- are done automatically, so the staff is lean (one nurse, one doc- ing medical students, as well as the audience, on routine gen- tor on call, two computer technicians, and a lot of security). eral anesthesia (assuming any procedure is routine). As he says, The staffing is an administrator’s dream. The plan is to house “Anesthesia is the easiest thing in the world until something one thousand patients a day, achieving economies of scale that goes wrong. It’s ninety-nine percent boredom and one percent permit charging sixty dollars a day. Visitors are only permit- scared- shitless panic.” His worst fears are realized when the ted on Tuesday, when physicians are able to tour the facility. patient’s heart rhythm becomes irregular; despite Wheeler’s Wheeler overhears a doctor’s name and some auction bidding. friend appearing pink and well-oxygenated, her blood pressure A heart is going to San Francisco for $75,000. Bidding starts falls. She seems to come around, but never wakes up; her pupils at $45,000 for a two-hour-old kidney that can be delivered to are fixed and dilated. As one doctor describes her to Wheeler, Zurich with a twenty-three-hour elapsed time. “She’s got complete squash rot—a total gomer. She’s brain dead. On her return to Boston Memorial, the maintenance man EEG completely flat!” Still, George cheerily says that “we can tells her to meet him in the basement that evening because he maintain her vital signs for one, two, or three years.” knows how the comas are being induced. Any moviegoer worth Wheeler is crushed and tries to find an answer. She learns her salt will know that this is the “kiss of death” for the poor that a preoperative specimen had been sent for tissue typing guy. Sure enough, he is electrocuted in a simulated accident (usually done only for transplant donors or recipients), but by a hitman who has also been stalking Wheeler. Through there is no doctor’s name on the requisition. On gaining unau- some pretty energetic detective work, Wheeler follows the line thorized access to the hospital information system, she learns from a carbon monoxide tank in the basement to the operat- that there have been 240 postoperative comas that year, ten ing room. The most exciting part of the picture involves her in healthy adults. Bellows explains it away by citing the law of being pursued by the hitman through the hospital amphi- averages in a hospital that does thirty thousand operations a theater, the pathology lab, the autopsy suite, and finally into year. Wheeler attempts to gain access to the charts of the young the refrigerator where victims to see if there is a common thread, but is denied. the dead bodies are Unlike most of the coma victims, her friend dies, and dur- stored. Hanging her- ing the autopsy, Wheeler learns something that we all learned self with the others, in medical school in the 1950s: if carbon monoxide is delivered she manages to bury for a few minutes rather than oxygen, the brain suffers, but the the blackguard under tissue remains nice and cherry pink.

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