Not as a Stranger
July. 01,1955 NR
Lucas Marsh, an intern bent upon becoming a first-class doctor, not merely a successful one. He courts and marries the warm-hearted Kristina, not out of love but because she is highly knowledgeable in the skills of the operating room and because she has frugally put aside her savings through the years. She will be, as he shrewdly knows, a supportive wife in every way. She helps make him the success he wants to be and cheerfully moves with him to the small town in which he starts his practice. But as much as he tries to be a good husband to the undemanding Kristina, Marsh easily falls into the arms of a local siren and the patience of the long-sorrowing Kristina wears thin.
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Reviews
Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.
The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.
The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.
It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,
Stanley Kramer's first directorial effort. Based on a best selling book. Major movie stars all around. Sadly a rather ho-hum picture.Mitchum is just too ... too... "Mitchum" for this one. He is stoic to the point of immobility. He is also too old to be a medical school student. It's hard to actually care about his financial and romantic problems because he is so self absorbed and self contained to be believed. Sinatra is better at bringing his character to life BUT he does seem like a replay of Eternity's Magio only without Fatso beating him up. One outstanding scene does involve Mitchum really getting on his case.Lee Marvin is in the cast as another medical student. Not a big part, but he IS there. Lon Chaney,Jr is painfully effective as the alcoholic father ( he also has a small role in Kramer's "The Defiant Ones" a couple of years later) The picture perks up once the doctors get into medical practice for themselves. Charles Bickford and Gloria Grahame playing their usual roles but playing them well. Locationwise, it's the biggest "small town" I have ever seen in a film. It's a city, what were they thinking ? The music swells. Olivia deHaviland chews the scenery in her sweet and then angry mode.Nothing new, nothing really special. Medical melodrama of its time.
40 minutes into this movie I'm thinking, "this dud has got to be over soon." I look down and check the running time and I am horrified to see that somehow it's 2 hours and 20 minutes long. 40 mins and I'm thinking omg, where is this obvious, interminable melodrama going? 40 mins in, and I'm thinking this might be a good time to settle on a genre. And I'm wondering, why on earth would DeHaviland take this degrading, 1-dimensional ethnic role? Why do they tease this out so laboriously? How did so much star power sign on to this undeveloped, inept movie? It must be this padded and pointless, to provide each of 5 or 6 major egos their own moment; all of them are wildly unrelated to the general flow of Mitchum's "big conflict" storyline, which is of no dramatic interest. What is the point? The only possible angle I can imagine for this movie is that it was a women's movie about men; and that female viewers in 1955 might imagine this oddity spoke to them, about their situations. Along with the unusually low quality of the script, a viewer will spend all his/her time picking the corn kernels out of the ham. And every frame of this looks like it was filmed on the cheap. Completely squandered, expensive cast.
Enjoyed this great story and all the actors who gave outstanding performances, especially Olivia De Havilland, (Kristina Hedvigson) who played the wife to Robert Mitchum,(Lucas Marsh). Kristina came from a wealthy family and fell in love with Lucas Marsh who was going to medical school and gave him financial support in his striving to become a successful surgeon. There are great scenes in the operating room and it was done so professionally that it kept you on pins and needles throughout the entire picture. Gloria Graham, (Harriet Lang) plays the role of a very sexy rich woman who teases and pleases Lucas Marsh and makes him feel very guilty for cheating on his wife. Frank Sinatra, (Alfred Boone) gives a great supporting role as a real close friend to Lucas and they both went through medical school together and each went their separate ways as doctors. There is plenty of drama and if you have not seen this Great Classic 1955 film, you will definitely want to view many great veteran actors at the top of their careers.
This movie is proof that a good director and great actors can still make a dull movie. In "Not As A Stranger," Lucas Marsh (Robert Mitchum) is a university medical student who has plenty of talent and determination to be a doctor, but very little heart. After his drunken father (Lon Chaney) spends his tuition money, Marsh will do anything to stay in medical school. He marries Kristina Hedvigson (Olivia De Havilland), a Scandinavian nurse that he does not love, but who can support his tuition. Marsh becomes a doctor, then moves to a small town called Greenville to work in a local hospital.Part of the problem with the movie is that Mitchum and his fellow medical students -- played by Frank Sinatra and Lee Marvin -- are too old to be believable as medical students. These are men in their late thirties and early forties, who look as if they should already be in medical practice, if not *teaching* medical classes. I was amazed to see Sinatra in a supporting role, since by this time, he was one of the major leading stars of Hollywood.Also, Olivia De Havilland is too old and too beautiful to be believable as an old maid nurse who has never married. (Her Swedish accent isn't very believable, either. Nor is it believable that Harry Morgan and Mae Clarke would be old enough to be her parents.) The operating room scenes, though dated, are the best scenes in the movie. The rest of the movie is a by-the-numbers soap opera that hits every last cliché right on the nose. It's like "General Hospital," but with more characters who are actually doctors and nurses and not just hunks, babes, or femme fatales.There are some unintentionally-funny scenes, such as when Marsh has an affair with Harriet Lang (Gloria Grahame), a young heiress who trains horses. (You can see this affair coming even before Grahame's character appears, over an hour into the movie.) After lustily staring at Lang in a few previous scenes, Marsh encounters her outside a stable. In a nearby corral is a black mare; in the stable stall is a lust-crazed white stallion who is bucking, kicking, whinnying, desperate to join the mare in the corral. Marsh unleashes his passion for Harriet Lang by literally "letting loose the wild horse." The movie has one really well-directed sequence, the final sequence in which Marsh performs an emergency operation. Aside from that, the rest of the movie is a forgettable, by-the-numbers melodrama. Even the title doesn't make any sense. And why did it get an Oscar nomination for Best Sound, of all things?
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