Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

vincentlynch-moonoi The good -- a fine performance by Clark Gable. I wasn't sure Gable would be convincing as a dedicated medical doctor, but his acting here was a pleasant surprise.The bad -- this is not the film's fault, but the print shown on TCM that I watched was quite poor.The ugly -- among all the talk of hard work and dedication, most of the doctors in the film acted like pathetic children.Overall, this was an interesting film (interesting does not equal good). Several of the sets were interesting in that they made the hospital look like the jewel of modernity, although patient rooms were "bare". Another plus here is the performance of Jean Hersholt ("grandfather" in "Heidi") as the wise old doctor and mentor to Gable.However, this film would make you wonder if anyone lived through a hospital visit back in the 1930s! In terms of acting, the biggest surprise...and for the negative...was that of Otto Kruger. I liked Kruger very much in later films, but here he was TERRIBLE! The female lead here was Myrna Loy, and she does just fine...nothing special...just good...although like another film I watched her in a few days ago, here she is not a very likable person.Should you watch this film. Yes, if you are a fan of Gables. Or if you are interested one perspective on medicine in the 1930s. Otherwise, I'd pass it by.Otto Kruger as Dr. Levine

nomoons11 After watching this I first thought that whoever edited this was just really bad. After reading about this films production history I understood why it ended up like this.The basic story of this one is that a dedicated young doctor is about to be married to a wealthy socialite girl but she's tired of him putting the hospital before her. After this argument he ends up in a sleeping area for docs and kisses a nurse in training. We go through a few patients dying and such and then the nurse herself ends up dying on the table and he and his future fiancé break up. No I'm not laving anything out cause that's pretty much what this film has in it.THe biggest problem this film has is the editing is just terrible...but....it's not the editors fault. The crux of this film involves the student nurse and the doctor played by Clark Gable. At the end of the film when she dies, we don't know what's happened. You will literally be guessing what happened. After this his fiancé leaves him and thats it. I decided to look around online and see if I was losing my mind. Well, turns out the hays code didn't like the mentioning of an "abortion" so that had to be cut out...along with was quite a few other bits to appease them. Abortion you say? Yup. Turns out the mystery in the film is the girl has an affair with the engaged doctor and she gets pregnant, has a back alley abortion where she develops and infection/blood clot and dies. Don't worry, this will only help with you trying to figure this one out. After knowing this you'll see what the Hays Code did to this "average" film.I think if your interested in watching this you'd better be a Gable or Loy fan cause other than that, it's not really gonna impress you or anyone to much.

Neil Doyle CLARK GABLE is a dedicated doctor conflicted by feelings involving the workplace and romance--almost the forerunner of the character ROBERT MITCHUM would play twenty years later (Luke) in NOT AS A STRANGER. The film deals with medicine much the way Stanley Kramer's film did, but it's based on a stage play and the static quality owes something to that and the lack of background music on the soundtrack.Of course it's all very dated--a giveaway is interns supposedly making $20 a week!! MYRNA LOY is a selfish, wealthy young woman who wishes Gable would give her his undivided attention instead of dedicating himself to work. Gable has to assert himself at the hospital when an older physician overrules his instructions on insulin and puts a patient into shock. Gable's character here is reminiscent of Lucas Marsh in Morton Thompson's best-seller NOT AS A STRANGER as he pulls the syringe from the doctor's hand and takes charge of the procedure.There are weak moments of comedy relief, mostly from WALLACE FORD, and a maudlin performance from OTTO KRUGER that is painfully overplayed. The dialog too, tends to be preachy about the medical profession.Self-doubting and lonely, Gable shares some romantic scenes with pretty nurse ELIZABETH ALLAN who confides in him about her own uneasy feelings as a nurse dealing daily with life and death situations. The love scene is handled with such discretion it's hard to determine the plot developments that come swiftly afterwards, but after Allan's tragic death Gable resumes his romance with Loy, who realizes his work will always come first in his life.Nothing deep here, just a routine medical drama with all of its stage bound ingredients intact. Music is only used once for a restaurant scene where violins are playing a Viennese waltz, which leaves a lot of the drama feeling flat and one-dimensional.JEAN HERSHOLT has his usual role of an avuncular medical man under whom Gable intends to study abroad, but the focal point is the Gable/Loy/Allan romantic triangle.Summing up: From any standpoint, a trifle in Gable's career and notable only in that he plays a more sensitive role than usual.

Noir Dame After films like "Convention City" stirred a growing uproar by groups like the Legion of Decency, the Hays Production Code swiftly shut a tight lid on controversial subjects. "Men in White" is very much a pre-Code film - a grimly realistic "slice of life" circa 1934.Sandwiched between his tough gangster roles in "Baby Face," "A Free Soul", and the macho-romantic roles he later specialized in (as in "It Happened One Night" and "Gone With the Wind"), this is one of Clark Gable's best performances. Underplayed wonderfully, Gable plays a moody doctor torn between marrying up, and his desire to further medicine and save lives.This is one of several pairings Gable had with Myrna Loy; in "Wife vs. Secretary," "Manhattan Melodrama," and "Men in White," their romances are compulsively watchable, but obviously headed for turbulence. You could boil it down to tension between his brusque, "salt of the earth" masculinity, and Loy's caring, but slightly petulant "uptown girl" persona. If the "Gable" type and the "Loy" type in these films made a "go of it", it would not be a marriage made in heaven... That's telegraphed from the first reel. But it is fun to watch.If you enjoy watching Loy as a witty, knowing wife in "The Thin Man" series, or frothy screwballs like "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House," you'll probably dislike her one-note, high-maintenance character here. As another reviewer said, she's nothing like Nora in this picture.The story and characters are not especially like "ER", which focused on emergency medicine. "Men in White" is more similar to the modern "Gray's Anatomy," or "St. Elsewhere." In all three story lines, young interns (and student nurses) find themselves at a crossroads, struggling to balance their professional ambitions with personal needs. "St. Elsewhere" also introduced us to older physicians with feet of clay, struggling to save their beloved hospital from budget cuts. Sure, those two descriptions cover some of the characters on "ER" - and on plenty of other films or TV shows without a medical setting... but "Men in White" is special for what it implies about the early 1930s, a time when the medical profession was neither resented or put on a pedestal, but simply portrayed as a special calling.This is also a time before soap operas and romantic films used "Doctor" as shorthand for "good catch". The hospital in question here runs a deficit, led in spirit by the research-oriented Dr. Hochberg (played, fittingly, by Jean Hersholt, one of Hollywood's most famous philanthropists). Hochberg's work is his life; he is an idealist who can barely imagine that a young doctor would not want to follow the same path. Another older doctor talks longingly of the dramatic changes that have occurred in his career, such as the introduction of hygiene methods - "sterilized" masks, coats and gloves were still pretty new. And there's a short scene where a hospital administrator blithely suggests that laboratory technicians should be fired to make more money. (Today, of course, lab costs are a money maker for some hospitals.) All in all, worlds away from "white lab coat" syndrome, bottom-line focused HMOs, and other modern problems of today's hospitals. SPOILER What makes this a pre-Code film, and likely prevented it from gaining more modern viewers or distribution, is a delicately played trio of scenes. One of the characters has had a back-alley abortion, and is rushed into surgery. The word "abortion" is never said, but 1930s viewers were on the level.