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 RWade 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. Her snooping reveals that a ton of corpses. Okay, only one operating room has been involved in all the unex- you say, all she has to pected comas, a fact that, strangely, no one else has discovered. do is bring her boy- She is treated by everyone as a hysterical woman, earning her friend up to see the two visits to the office of Dr. Harris, the hospital director and buried hitman, but chief of surgery, played with just the right mix of paternalism no, she goes out to and menace by Richard Widmark. He spends a lot of time the Jefferson Institute

The Pharos/Summer 2008 37 The physician at the movies

for the tour and gets into “another fine mess.” Still, James Bond has nothing on her, and she doesn’t need violence or high-tech gimmicks to outsmart her myriad of pursuers. Just when you think she is the smartest per- son alive, she goes unescorted to the hospital di- rector’s office. There she sees “George Harris” on his Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society certificate and she makes the connection with the name she overheard. Uh-oh! And she took that drink he offered! Turns out it was laced with a drug that simulates peritonitis. Before he has her wheeled to OR 8, he gives an impassioned No Way Out. Sidney Poitier (middle) and Richard Widmark (right). speech: “When you’re older, you’ll learn that Credit: 20th Century Fox/Photofest. everything is complicated. There is no black and white—only gray. Our society faces monumental decisions about the right to die, abortion, terminal illness, pro- Hospital, he has just taken the state medical board examina- longed coma, transplantation decisions. Society isn’t deciding. tion and is agonizing about whether he should go into practice Congress isn’t deciding. The courts aren’t deciding. Religion or stay on at the hospital. He meets Dr. Wharton (Stephen isn’t deciding. They’re leaving it up to us, the experts, the McNally), the chief resident, and they discuss the boards. “The doctors. America spends $175 billion on medical care. These boards can’t be too tough—that’s what all doctors agree on great hospital complexes are the cathedrals of our age. Billions after they have passed. They want it to be tougher on the next of dollars; thousands of beds; a whole nation of sick people group.” Dr. Wharton tells him that he can stay on another year, turning to us. They’re children. They trust us. We can’t tell and the happy Brooks proceeds to the prison ward to admit them everything. Our job is to make things easier for them, two shooting victims. On the elevator, Lefty (Dotts Johnson) because medicine is now a great social force. The individual is the black elevator operator tells him, “The boys are saying that too small.” Wheeler passes out, mercifully ending this megalo- the test is just for colored doctors” and that “they probably maniacal diatribe, which sounds more like Hollywood Doctor want to make it harder on you.” Brooks responds that it is no than AΩA philosophy. harder for him than for other doctors. Everyone, even Bellows, is impressed that the chief himself The film’s voltage is about to go sky-high with the entry of is going to perform the appendectomy. He says, “House staff Ray Biddle, played by Richard Widmark with the same ma- deserve the very best care in their own hospital.” Finally, when niacal viciousness that he brought to Kiss of Death. As Brooks Harris insists on using OR 8, Bellows becomes a believer. Still, begins to examine him, Ray spits at him, and recalls the many he insists on tracking the carbon monoxide line himself. In times he and his white hooligan friends from the equally im- real life, Wheeler would have been a goner, since she develops poverished “Beaver Canal went over to clean up Niggertown.” an irregular heartbeat and should go the way of her friend. In Lefty reminds him, “You’re talking to a doctor,” prompting Ray the end, though, she wakes up and Harris is carted off to the to say, “I don’t want him; I want a white doctor.” The police- hoosegow. Don’t ask how one man could orchestrate this whole man says, “We’ll turn the lights out, so you won’t know the enterprise or how he got admitted to AΩA. Just suspend dis- difference.” belief and make sure you don’t decide to watch this film before The next sequence sets up the dramatic tension that will elective surgery, or any other surgery for that matter. carry the film, but does so at the expense of medical accuracy. Brooks learns that Johnny and Ray were caught robbing a gas No Way Out (1950) station. When Johnny ran away, he appeared confused, and ran Starring Sidney Poitier, Richard Widmark, Linda Darnell, into the gas pump. On observing the young man, he appears to Stephen McNally. have abnormal breathing and a lack of sensation when a lighted Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Running time 116 minutes. cigarette burns down to his fingertips. Then using an ophthal- Although unrated, it would be R for extensive use of the N moscope, Brooks detects papilledema. That it has nothing to word. do with the gunshot wounds is only a minor distraction. The main problem is what Brooks does next, that is, prepare to do a ike many of its ­hospital-based predecessors, No Way spinal tap. As medical students in the ’50s, we were taught not Out opens with a harried switchboard operator direct- to do one if one suspected increased pressure and a brain tu- ingL ambulances in a county hospital. When we first meet Dr. mor, because the brain might herniate, causing pressure on the Luther Brooks (Sidney Poitier), the first black intern at County brainstem that could be immediately fatal. Furthermore, he’s all

38 The Pharos/Summer 2008 by himself and doesn’t call for an attending physician backup, worked so hard, harder than anybody to get where you are. reasoning that this is an emergency. This is hard to fathom, Shoes you shined; dishes you washed; garbage you dumped; the given that Johnny only came in because he got shot and must food you couldn’t buy because you needed books. Remember have been walking around like this for a while. Anyway, Brooks how you studied? How I asked you questions over and over? goes down the hall to ask the orderly for a procedure set. The Questions I couldn’t even pronounce. Coffee, coffee, and more orderly says, “I don’t recall anyone using that thing before.” coffee. Slapping you to keep you awake and when you told me Brooks does the tap and the boy suddenly dies. Ray screams A was your passing mark, not for the others, just for you. You out, “He took it out on Johnny. He wanted it to be me. I’ll get got them—all A’s.” you for that, you black rat.” Ray’s “deaf and dumb” brother, George (Harry Bellaver), I’ll stop here to let you see the rest of the visits, and the policeman says, “Get the dummy out.” This in- picture which depicts a race riot and an intense sensitive line is as important as the depiction of raw racism in battle between Ray and Brooks. exposing the fallacy of another uneducated belief that needed exposure. It turns out that George “can read lips a block away.” Of the many remarkable things in this film is the consistent He has deciphered that Brooks wants an autopsy to prove the performance of Widmark as a hate-filled racist. The interplay man had a brain tumor. Ray taunts Brooks, saying “Beaver with Poitier is electric and, indeed, Widmark apologized to Canal is full of Johnny’s pals. Wait till they find out how he got Poitier for being so bitter and menacing as well as for the racist killed and by what. I’d sure hate to be living in Niggertown.” language he spewed. In his marvelous autobiography,1 Poitier Ray then tells Brooks that George told him everything and that recalled that this was the first movie his Bahamian parents there won’t be an autopsy. had ever seen. When Widmark’s “beating the crap out of me The hospital director, Sam Moreland (Stanley Ridges), calls with his pistol, my mother jumps up in the theater and yells, Wharton into his office and tells him of a brief article on the ‘Hit him back, Sidney! Hit him back! You never did nothing to back page of the newspaper, saying that “one of the brothers him!’ ” suffering from a superficial wound in his leg, died shortly after The film also portrays the deprivation in Ray Biddle’s back- admission to the hospital. Cause of death was not revealed.” ground that gives insight into, without in any way excusing, his He’s scared to death that the press will blow the story up and anger and hatred. This balance between “in your face” dialogue find out that the doctor was black. He would rather let it go and subtlety is what elevates the film from being merely a soap away and refuses to authorize an autopsy without family per- opera to the level of a classic. Also ringing true are the family mission. “Don’t go reading into it that I’m ­anti-Negro. Why scenes documenting the sacrifices for Luther Brooks to get if anything I’m pro-Negro,” he says. Wharton replies, “I’m where he is, as well as his struggle to overcome racism as he pro good doctor—white, black, or polka dot.” Moreland tells tries to minister to his patients. The side commentary involving Wharton that getting public funds is not easy. He says that in the supporting cast is also interesting, such as Brooks’s brother his present position, M.D. means “something different now— studying for a difficult postal examination or Ray’s impaired Master of Doubletalk.” brother who is far from “a dummy.” There’s also an excellent Wharton agrees to accompany Brooks to visit Johnny’s scene where Wharton’s black maid asserts that no one can widow, Edie (Linda Darnell), to request an autopsy. Wharton take away her pride in what she does for a living—an attitude introduces Brooks as the doctor who “tried to save your hus- I heard from my immigrant grandmother who also worked as band.” She says “You mean Johnny died in a colored hospital?” a cleaning woman until her retirement at age ­sixty-five. Then, Wharton replies, “Doctor Brooks is on my staff at County there is the smoldering resentment of black men who, after Hospital. He couldn’t have had a better doctor.” It turns out that fighting for their country, weren’t being accorded respect. In Edie hates the Biddle brothers and is divorced from Johnny. She short, the film provides enough material for a whole course in agrees to think about visiting Ray to persuade him to agree to sociology. the autopsy. Brooks returns home, where his brother is studying for an Reference exam to be a mailman and his mother and sister are prepar- 1. Poitier S. The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography. ing dinner. They have invited a local physician to dinner to San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco; 2000. convince Brooks to join him in practice so that they can begin to get some money into the house. When Brooks’s wife returns Dr. Dans (AΩA, Columbia University College of Physicians and home from her job, he collapses on the bed and tells her that Surgeons, 1960) is a member of The Pharos’s editorial board and “I’m not sure of myself in so many ways. I need another year has been its film critic since 1990. His address is: with Wharton. With Clark and his big, fat practice I’d never 11 Hickory Hill Road know when I’m a good doctor.” As he drifts off to sleep, his Cockeysville, Maryland 21030 wife comforts him saying “You’ve got a right to be tired. You E-mail: [email protected]

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