CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

sfmarkh I was surprised by how good this movie is, as others have commented. I found it to be. I saw it as psychological character study in addition to a fine medical drama. Of course some of the drama was a bit heavy handed for today's audience but for it's time, this was standard.Mitchum's performance was spot on. I am a grandson and nephew of two very fine surgeons and I can attest from them, that there are doctors who are very driven and perfectionists who are hardest on themselves and others and extremely difficult to work with. Mitchum's expectations underscore his dedication to medicine and the tremendous responsibility some doctor's bring to the profession.. Unfortunately when a person is so immersed in their work, working insane hours, their personal life suffers affecting all aspects of one's life. Family takes the back seat, self care such as eating is neglected and as Mitchum portrayed so well, some people become numb emotionally, dissociating from their own emotions often to escape a painful past. Mitchum's alcoholic father negatively affected and created a dysfunctional family. The ending, SPOILER ALERT, was quite effective at showing the doctor finally allowing himself to be vulnerable, able to realize he can't be perfect, and feeling real emotions, probably for the first time since childhood. I won't go into other details about the fine cast, as others have done so. Very recommended!

Karl Ericsson I'm a general practitioner and I can tell that this kind of doctoring regretfully does not exist anymore. I do not mean the business with the mole which, of course by what we know now, was wrong. I mean that these guys were really general practitioners who did almost everything, leaving almost nothing to specialists.But that's not really why this movie is good. The character that Mitchum plays is a complicated one but still his motive is to be somebody that matters in this world, to be a genuinely worthy doctor. He doesn't lack heart but he lacks tolerance.The reason I like this film is however that it describes people who truly care. Tolerance has a danger to slip into permissiveness, especially concerning power and that has happened too much today. With all it's shortcomings, and there are indeed some, the times that are displayed here still were a lot more decent than what we have today and what makes this film especially precious is that you can see the embryo of more evil times to follow if you are attentive enough.A film to learn from in many ways.

Steve McLaughlin Wooden Mitchum maybe at 40 playing a medical student was slightly unbelievable, as well as the other 30's-40's actors in medical school. The Script is excellent as well the story, just not the cast. The positives are Olivia de Havilland and Sinatra. The story is so good, it carries the film regardless of the miscasting. 6/10 This wonderful script deserved better. Havilland saved it almost solely. The music was exceptional, as well as the lighting.The unintentional comedy moments make up for some of the drab. Mitchum's lack of expression is comical during the film. The only time he shows real emotion is his crying when his dad dies and it's done from behind.

Rob-120 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?