The Courageous Dr. Christian

Jean Hersholt is concerned about the squatters living in a shanty town just outside the city limits. He persuades the town council to build some decent housing, if he can get the land from Vera Lewis, who wears no make up in this movie. After he gets the land, and Miss Lewis as his fiancee -- not his idea! -- the council changes their minds. The shanty town moves to the empty lot, and just as the authorities send in the police to drive them out, meningitis breaks out and Hersholt orders everyone into quarantine.

I couldn't look at this eighty-year-old movie without thinking about how the more things change, they don't change at all, thanks to a script co-written by Ring Lardner Jr. The movie starts out silly and clunky, and only my insistence on seeing it through made me stick around to the point where it turned very interesting.

This is one of six Dr. Christian films made by RKO starring the fine character actor, Jean Hersholt. In all of the films, Christian is a bit of a crusader, though this one seems to be the most overtly preachy. In many ways, the film is overly dramatic and hard to believe, but the acting and good intentions of the film make it well worth seeing.

The film has to do with "Squatter's Town"--the poor section of town where the sanitation stinks and life is relatively cheap. The rest of the town is rather indifferent to their plight, as they are seen as deserving of their lifestyle. However, instead of just accepting this, Christian decides to try to save some of the folks--including Tom Neal and two kids he's caring for in a condemned shack. He arranges for a nice home for the two little kids and takes Neal into his own home. But he doesn't stop there--as he then crusades for a new housing project to take the place of the squalor. The town, however, isn't particularly concerned and are rather antagonistic to the idea. When an epidemic strikes the poor folks, the townspeople change their minds--and become part of the solution.

The film is very socialist in its stance, though it doesn't just advocate government intervention but a populist approach where people help each other through the goodness of their hearts. It seems a bit over-idealistic, but has a sweet sentiment. Plus, the film manages with all its earnestness to somehow pull it off just fine. A very good B-movie.

By the way, in the film Tom Neal is an incredibly pugnacious and obnoxious person. In real life, he was FAR worse--and his IMDb biography is positively scary. How this Harvard grad destroyed his own career with off-screen violence is a sad story and a case of art imitating life, as he often portrayed thick-headed jerks with a penchant for violence.

By the way, in the drug store scene get a load of the 1940s style pinball machine. If you look carefully, you'll notice something is missing--flippers. They were introduced years later and made the machines a heck of a lot more interesting.

The second film of the Dr. Christian series has Jean Hersholt working on slum clearance in his small Minnesota town. It's hard to fathom in this day and age, but right up to World War II there were these ramshackle villages in just about every community made up of the migrant, the poor, and the dispossessed. In such a community Dr. Christian finds Tom Neal caring for his younger siblings. These ramshackle Hoovervilles so dubbed for the former president were breeding grounds for disease and pestilence.

Disease does come in the form of spinal meningitis and the last third of the film is The Courageous Dr. Christian both fighting the disease and the stubbornness of the town council which fails to see its social responsibility.

Hersholt wants a housing project and he's got the spot for it, some vacant land owned by rich widow Vera Lewis. But Vera while taking in Neal's siblings also has ideas about matrimony with the good doctor. That's maybe too big a sacrifice for Jean Hersholt to make.

There's also a bit of romantic rivalry between Neal and the Dr. Christian regulars, nurse Dorothy Lovett and druggist Robert Baldwin.

All in all a good entry in the Dr. Christian series.