Hindsight

Before the girls and I ventured out today, we caught one of the Dr. Kildare films from the mid 1930s. Like the Andy Hardy Flicks from the same studio, MGM,  I find these films so comforting.  16 Kildares made between 1937-47, and  It's odd because the films, really serials before Television comes in some 10-15 years later, are blatantly phony, syrupy and impossibly sanitized.  But, I just love them.

   Lionel Barrymore & Lew Ayres

I always had a soft spot for Lew Ayres, a sensitive actor whose work in All Quiet on the Western Front, and then later Johnny Belinda are the antithesis of anything he does in Kildare. Ayres was also a dedicated pacifist who fought all of his life to speak of a world rooted in peace, an amazing man.  Although, I value his other more refined and nuanced films, there is just something about Dr. Kildare that gets me every time.  You know what?  I have no idea why.  So just asked Joelle.  God my kids are smart, "well mom, I think there is a part of all of us that wants some things in life to be simple.  Where problems get worked through and the good guy really wears the white doctors suit."  Maybe that is part of it.  Deep down I am a traditionalists, ah, can't be! But, I do like the starched uniforms of the nurses, with their pointed caps, the sparkling hallways that make way for the gurneys with sick people who don't bleed, and only die when they are ready.

As a media scholar, I also pay attention to the costumes, too well tailored for real doctors and nurses, the equipment curiously outdated artifacts of then cutting edge medical science, to the style of acting and choices of diseases discussed.  All of these things situate the episodic Dr. Kildare in the middle to later parts of the American Depression.

Hubba, Hubba, Calling Richard Chamberlain (deep in the closet)

The drama, based on a series of books of course becomes the wildly successful Richard Chamberlain series in the early 1960s.  Wonder why they never show reruns of that venture?
We didn't really get into Andy Hardy movies, think I will save that for another day, but can't help mentioning that it always makes me laugh to know that Mickey Rooney was hardly the virginal character he portrays in these ventures.  :)