The Movie Doctors. Simon Mayo

rapist urges of its central character to the attachment of a brand new penis, which apparently had a mind of its own. A similar scenario resurfaced in the 1971 British film Percy, which proudly boasted ‘music by The Kinks!’

      In Michael Crichton’s 1978 thriller Coma, patients at an apparently caring hospital would be drugged into a state of suspended animation and then harvested for body parts to be sold to the highest bidder, a paranoid fantasy which struck a nerve with a public becoming increasingly disturbed by urban myths about organ theft (a myth that was still going strong when Stephen Frears made the black-market body-parts thriller Dirty Pretty Things in 2002).

      Just as cinema has always been innately suspicious of organ transplants, so film-makers would also leap upon genetic engineering as a way of getting under their audience’s skin. The key text here is Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls, adapted from H.G. Wells’s nineteenth-century novel The Island of Doctor Moreau in 1932, and long refused a certificate by the BBFC on the grounds that its subject matter was ‘against nature’ (it has since been reclassified as an uncut ‘PG’ – how times change. See p.196). Charles Laughton excelled as the bad doctor who dreams of cross-breeding animals and humans, while Kathleen Burke’s animal charms graced eye-catching posters which promised that ‘THE PANTHER WOMAN lured men on – only to destroy them body and soul!’ Despite the censors’ anxieties, the figure of Dr Moreau has proven another popular cinematic staple, resurfacing regularly as the embodiment of twisted medical madness, played by such stars as Burt Lancaster in Don Taylor’s 1977 adaptation, and Marlon Brando in John Frankenheimer’s 1996 version. If you look hard enough, you can just about spot the ghost of Dr Moreau in the figure of Dieter Laser’s Dr Heiter from Tom Six’s repulsive The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009), a movie which reminds us that even in the twenty-first-century, doctors are viewed as twisted madmen by the cinemagoing public.

      So, have the movies been bad for medicine? Well, not entirely. In his terrific 2005 book Mad, Bad or Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema, Professor Sir Christopher Frayling points out that ‘Horror films have had some very unexpected social consequences, just like the research they are depicting, even within the scientific community.’ In particular, Frayling points to the legacy of the 1931 Frankenstein, which unexpectedly inspired a medical breakthrough by Dr Jean B. Rosenbaum of New Mexico. According to Frayling, ‘the idea of the first cardiac pacemaker came to him in 1951 when he recalled being scared out of his wits as a child by the laboratory scene in James Whale’s Frankenstein

      . . . The memory of electricity stimulating Karloff’s body as he twitched into life on the slab led directly to his invention of the pacemaker.’

      All of which means that if you are one of the many people whose lives have been immeasurably improved by the insertion of a small but effective heart regulator, then you owe your good health to the healing power of cinema in general, and horror movies in particular!

      As the Movie Doctors like to say: It’s alive!

      AND RELAX

      How the Movies Can Relieve Stress and Anxiety

      Modern Life, so Blur taught us, is rubbish. If that is taking it a little too far, modern life is certainly stressful. Your job prospects, your bank balance, your parents, your housemates, your deadlines, your kids and your ailments are just the start of it. Then there’s the government, other governments, terror threats, international financial insecurity, global warming and films shown in the wrong aspect ratio (see p.110). Life is so complicated.

      Many turn to alcohol, drugs and decadence. This is understandable – there are times when the Movie Doctors have been known to seek solace in the adult beverage cupboard. This section exists to point to a road less travelled. When those anxious moments take hold, when the burden of the day seems off the scale, watch a movie. Watch the right movie. Here are some stress-busters we can prescribe that should have the desired effect. Lie back, breathe deeply, press play.

      84 CHARING CROSS ROAD (1987)

      (Includes spoilers, on the sound basis that you really don’t want any surprises.)

      The only way this won’t work is if you find the idea of two old people reading letters aloud to each other for 100 minutes a bit too racy. Then you might struggle. For everyone else, welcome to the world of antique books. Usually you might expect the cinematic treatment of ancient, dusty tomes to include at least a murdered thirteenth-century monk hell bent on revenge on the first modern reader it can find (usually a blousy woman up to no good). But not here. Anne Bancroft stars – and we all know she can blouse if she wants to – but in David Jones’s film of Helene Hanff’s bestseller (via James Roose-Evans’s play), all she wants is books. Not just any books, but rare books, the kind of books that Anthony Hopkins sells. She writes to him. He replies. She thanks him for his reply, he sends more books. They never meet. He dies.

      Bancroft and Hopkins are, of course, wonderful. She is a struggling writer and therefore difficult and feisty. He is the manager of the bookshop and therefore studious and quiet. Very few actors do stillness like Sir Anthony, and his portrayal of Frank Doe is a study in self-containment.

      A transatlantic love story where the protagonists don’t share a single scene is a gentle, warming, noble experience. Maybe your relationships would have been easier if you’d never actually met anyone, just experienced the whole thing – as here – in voice-over? Cleaner and neater all round.