The Movie Doctors. Simon Mayo

In The Abominable Doctor Phibes (1971), Vincent Price is a music and theology specialist who murders the medical doctors he blames for killing his wife. Starting to see a pattern here?

      MEDICAL TOP TRUMPS

      Who Would You Like to See by Your Bedside?

      Think about it: if someone asks you to name a famous screen physician, you’re more likely to come up with the murder suspects of Doctor X’s medical academy than the jovially roguish interns of Doctor in the House (1954). This is true across a wide range of medical disciplines. Is cinema’s most famous nurse Barbara Windsor’s lovable Nurse Sandra May from Carry on Doctor (1967), or Louise Fletcher’s sadistic Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)? Cinema’s favourite dentist? No contest – Laurence Olivier as escaped Nazi Dr Christian Szell who tortures Dustin Hoffman with an assortment of whirring drills while asking, ‘Is it safe? Is it safe?’ As for cinema’s best psychiatrist, look no further than Anthony Hopkins as Dr Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991, and its various sequels/prequels), the doctor who decided to stop treating his patients and start eating them instead. (We’ll overlook the fact that Brian Cox actually originated the Hannibal the Cannibal role in Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986), a film which remains the best adaption of any Thomas Harris novel.)

      Everywhere you look, the movies are full of terrible medical role models doing things no doctor should, from Vincent Price’s pathologist Dr Warren Chapin accidentally setting a centipede-like terror-parasite loose in 1959’s ‘Percepto’-enhanced shocker The Tingler (‘When the screen screams, you’ll scream too . . . if you value your life!’) to Jeffrey Combs’s medical student Herbert West messing around with undead decapitated heads in Stuart Gordon’s disgustingly scrungy Re-Animator (1985). Even when portrayed sympathetically on screen, medics usually have a touch of madness about them. Perhaps the most heroic doctors of modern movies are Donald Sutherland’s ‘Hawkeye’ Pierce and Elliott Gould’s ‘Trapper John’ McIntyre in MASH, both of whom spend most of the movie battling to retain their sanity by indulging in ever crazier acts of war-torn madness, spiced up by ‘Suicide is Painless’ singalongs. Meanwhile, Donald Pleasence’s Dr Sam Loomis may be the nominal ‘good guy’ in John Carpenter’s 1978 stalk-and-slash smash Halloween, but his character somehow manages to be the creepiest thing on screen. No wonder they kept bringing him back for the sequels.

      There are, of course, examples of charming, attractive and basically decent doctors in cinema: think of Lew Ayres as dashing Dr Kildare in a string of movies from the thirties and forties (Calling Dr Kildare, The Secret of Dr Kildare, Dr Kildare’s Strange Case, Dr Kildare Goes Home etc); of Omar Sharif as Doctor Zhivago in David Lean’s timelessly sweeping 1965 historical romance; or even of Robin Williams as the loveable Patch Adams, merrily waving his bottom at the medical establishment as he proves that laughter can be a cure for almost anything (the Movie Doctors concur on this point – see ‘Laughing Gas’, p.46). Sometimes the casting can be a little credibility-stretching. Did anybody really buy Meg Ryan as a heart surgeon communing with heavenly creatures in the syrupy City of Angels (1998)? Or Keanu Reeves as a dashing doctor with the hots for Diane Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give (2003)? Or Gael García Bernal making white-coated goo-goo eyes at Kate Hudson in A Little Bit of Heaven (2011), a ‘romantic fantasy’ which included the unforgettable valentine card greeting ‘Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, I’ve Got Ass Cancer . . .’? These doctors were unconvincing, but also unthreatening. Yet since the birth of the moving image, we’ve been more than ready to see doctors as little more than mad scientists, with patients their (often unwilling) test tubes.

      Two key texts underwrite cinema’s long-standing nervousness about bad science and even worse medicine: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Both proved terrifyingly popular novels, and have been endlessly adapted and reinterpreted on screen, striking a chilling chord with cinema audiences. As early as 1908, Otis Turner’s production of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde established the figure of the physician who fails to heal himself (in the book he’s actually a research chemist) as a beastly cinema staple. Umpteen adaptations followed, with John Barrymore famously taking the title role in John S. Robertson’s 1920 silent, Fredric March winning an Oscar for his portrayal of the mad doctor in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 version, and Spencer Tracy co-starring alongside Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner in the 1941 remake of Mamoulian’s hit, which again drew heavily on Thomas Russell Sullivan’s stage play. As the movie adaptations multiplied, so Hyde’s crimes worsened, his character becoming weirdly conflated (as it had been in theatrical productions) with the legend of Jack the Ripper, cementing the cinematic archetype of the monstrous doctor.

      As for Frankenstein, an early screen version produced by the Edison company saw director J. Searle Dawley laying the template for the bubbling cauldrons and magical hocus-pocus that would define mad screen doctors and scientists for decades to come. Other famous adaptations of Shelley’s text included James Whale’s legendary 1931 production in which Colin Clive memorably screams ‘It’s alive!’; Hammer’s studio-defining 1957 shocker The Curse of Frankenstein with Peter Cushing as Victor and Christopher Lee as his ungodly creation; and Kenneth Branagh’s much-maligned 1994 reboot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein which proved that being a mad doctor hell-bent on resurrecting deceased body parts didn’t mean you couldn’t be ripped. The movie bombed after director/star Branagh was berated by critics for making Victor a hunk who spent a lot of time running around with his shirt off. In fact, Ken’s youthful portrayal was closer to Shelley’s source than the ageing, tweedy weirdos who had become the stock-in-trade of cinema adaptations.

      Of course, these early screen ‘doctors’ were often more mad scientists than medics, the confusion and conflation of the two being an integral part of cinema’s approach to both professions. As far as cinema audiences were concerned, there was a very thin line between ‘making people better’ and attempting to ‘play God’, and turn-of-the-century advances in both science and medicine merely added to this sense of unease. It’s no coincidence that the birth of cinema itself was tied up with the growing use of electricity, a mysterious power of which everyone was aware but few understood. With its roots in the phantasmagorical magic lantern displays of the carnival sideshow, early cinema exploited its audience’s fascination with (and fear of) electricity, with Doctors Frankenstein and Rotwang employing spectacular electrostatic arcs to breathe unnatural life into their respective creations.

      Other medical developments which have inspired some freakishly disturbing films include the transplantation of organs, research into which flourished in the bloody aftermath of the First World War. In 1924, Robert Wiene’s Austrian gem The Hands of Orlac attached the fingers of a murderer onto the body of Conrad Veidt’s formerly peaceful pianist, setting in motion a string of transplant-based horrors which would flourish throughout the twentieth century. Several adaptations and re-imaginings of Maurice Renard’s 1920 potboiler Les Mains d’Orlac followed, most famously Karl Freund’s Mad Love (1935), in which former Frankenstein Colin Clive played Stephen Orlac, while Peter Lorre leered menacingly as a lovestruck Doctor Gogol. (‘Suitable Only for Adults’ declared the poster for Mad Love, in which Lorre’s staring eyes epitomised the cinematic spectre of the ever-so-slightly deranged doctor.) In 1960, an Anglo-French production of The Hands of Orlac was shot simultaneously in French and English, co-stars Mel Ferrer and Christopher Lee taking great pride in their ability to perform their roles in both languages, while the 1962 American horror Hands of a Stranger told this now familiar story once again under the lurid tag line: ‘The surgeon’s scalpel writes a thriller!’

      The early seventies saw a spate of Orlac-inspired transplant