Paul Muni is Dr. Sam Abelman, a frank and abrasive general practitioner whose office is in his apartment in a crummy neighborhood in Brooklyn. A shifty, pill-popping, TV producer (David Wayne), producer of a program called "Americans USA", as opposed to, say, "Americans Canada", persuades Muni to appear on a kind of "Person to Person" live show, with the connivance of Muni's bright and ambitious nephew. (The BHS on the back of the nephew's jacket stands for Bronx High School of Science, an elite school attended by bright and ambitious kids.) Luther Adler is Max, an old friend and classmate of Muni's who has become a famous and somewhat cynical icon in the medical community, a specialist in adjustment disorders of the rich. Everybody wants Sam Abelman to come out of this TV program ahead for a change. "You've got to sweeten the kitty," Adler tells Wayne's producer. Sam, on the other hand, is an iconoclast who cares almost exclusively about his impoverished patients, though he dreams of a modest house in a quieter neighborhood. He'd like to visit Walden Pond someday too. His favorite reading is Thoreau.
SPOILERS.
Alas, there is a run-through of the TV show, witnessed only by the producers, network, and sponsors, and it looks fine. Abelman comes across as a man without guile. He's entirely honest with his interviewer and with the audience. He rises to his feet and tells us that there is kickback to be found in the medical industry. And mental hospitals are terrible. And drugs are invented for which there are no diseases yet. (The professionals watching this seem shocked, and some are amused!) Before the interview is finished, Abelman hears that one of his patients is in trouble and rushes off camera. End of run through.
That takes up the first two thirds of the film, leading us to believe that this is going to be a kind of mild expose of medical practice. But no. The script dumps the TV program entirely when Sam Abelman gets a heart attack while climbing stairs to rescue a patient. The family gather round, and Max comes running over to treat him at home, while Paul Muni gives a good impression of an old man (68) who shoots an embolism, gets sick, and dies. The ambitious nephew doesn't seem to have learned much from the experience but David Wayne has decided there are more important things in life than celebrity and money, and he goes home with his wife, probably to read Thoreau. I forget. Did Thoreau die broke after adzing all that wood? The acting is uniformly hammy but it's not offensive because all the performers are operating on the same emotional level. The characters and their development are drawn simply enough for a kindergartener to comprehend. The director, Daniel Mann, wields the camera like a sledgehammer -- people make speeches at the lens, and there are lots of close ups, and movements are blocked so that no one gets in anyone else's way.
Aside from the legerdemain involved in substituting the long dying scene for the TV show, the story is so simple as to be one step away from being simple minded. And yet it is still gripping. For one thing, it provides us with a flashbulb shot of what medicine was like 50 years ago, when there WERE family practitioners who actually HAD black bags and made personal calls to the houses of poor people. Not any more. I was having dinner at the home of a family practitioner who got a call from a frightened patient whose mother had evidently gone balmy and thought spies were after her. The doc handed me the phone and let me listen for a while, then cupped his hand over the receiver and asked what I would do. I mumbled something about getting over there and shooting Mom full of phenothiazines. "Wrong." Instead, he instructed the patient to take mother to the ER and let them handle it. That's where all the facilities and staff were now located -- not in a black bag. Further, house calls had been dumped in the dustbin of history because they were inefficient. Why have a doc waste time driving around when the patients could be lined up in appointments and treated serially? Of course being sick and treated in a hospital is vastly more expensive that lying in bed at home, but balances must be struck.
I won't argue that the balance is out of whack but I miss the Sam Abelmans. They had a genuine place in the community. And despite the primitive story, characters, and techniques on display here, the passing of Abelman is an honest, if inevitable, tragedy, as is the passing of a way of life filled with such intimacy, or the passing of an old and noble iconoclast.
SPOILERS.
Alas, there is a run-through of the TV show, witnessed only by the producers, network, and sponsors, and it looks fine. Abelman comes across as a man without guile. He's entirely honest with his interviewer and with the audience. He rises to his feet and tells us that there is kickback to be found in the medical industry. And mental hospitals are terrible. And drugs are invented for which there are no diseases yet. (The professionals watching this seem shocked, and some are amused!) Before the interview is finished, Abelman hears that one of his patients is in trouble and rushes off camera. End of run through.
That takes up the first two thirds of the film, leading us to believe that this is going to be a kind of mild expose of medical practice. But no. The script dumps the TV program entirely when Sam Abelman gets a heart attack while climbing stairs to rescue a patient. The family gather round, and Max comes running over to treat him at home, while Paul Muni gives a good impression of an old man (68) who shoots an embolism, gets sick, and dies. The ambitious nephew doesn't seem to have learned much from the experience but David Wayne has decided there are more important things in life than celebrity and money, and he goes home with his wife, probably to read Thoreau. I forget. Did Thoreau die broke after adzing all that wood? The acting is uniformly hammy but it's not offensive because all the performers are operating on the same emotional level. The characters and their development are drawn simply enough for a kindergartener to comprehend. The director, Daniel Mann, wields the camera like a sledgehammer -- people make speeches at the lens, and there are lots of close ups, and movements are blocked so that no one gets in anyone else's way.
Aside from the legerdemain involved in substituting the long dying scene for the TV show, the story is so simple as to be one step away from being simple minded. And yet it is still gripping. For one thing, it provides us with a flashbulb shot of what medicine was like 50 years ago, when there WERE family practitioners who actually HAD black bags and made personal calls to the houses of poor people. Not any more. I was having dinner at the home of a family practitioner who got a call from a frightened patient whose mother had evidently gone balmy and thought spies were after her. The doc handed me the phone and let me listen for a while, then cupped his hand over the receiver and asked what I would do. I mumbled something about getting over there and shooting Mom full of phenothiazines. "Wrong." Instead, he instructed the patient to take mother to the ER and let them handle it. That's where all the facilities and staff were now located -- not in a black bag. Further, house calls had been dumped in the dustbin of history because they were inefficient. Why have a doc waste time driving around when the patients could be lined up in appointments and treated serially? Of course being sick and treated in a hospital is vastly more expensive that lying in bed at home, but balances must be struck.
I won't argue that the balance is out of whack but I miss the Sam Abelmans. They had a genuine place in the community. And despite the primitive story, characters, and techniques on display here, the passing of Abelman is an honest, if inevitable, tragedy, as is the passing of a way of life filled with such intimacy, or the passing of an old and noble iconoclast.