Supposedly John Ford enjoyed working with Ronald Colman a lot during the making of this film, and together they achieve some notable results. What a shame they didn’t make any other films together. Typically, Ford was busy at his home studio Fox, while Colman was under contract to producer Samuel Goldwyn. Ford made another picture on loan to Goldwyn later — HURRICANE (1937).
Here Ford seems to understand the small-town picket fences mentality of the main characters. Colman plays the titular doctor who starts as a medical student at a modest college, where he meets a young nurse (Helen Hayes) with not much experience herself. They quickly marry, and responsibilities of providing for a new wife mean that Colman must sacrifice his original plan of pursuing a career in a lab as a scientific doctor. Instead, he goes with Hayes to her small midwestern community and sets up shop as a general practitioner.
Though he does help some of the locals, it is clear (to Colman at least) that he doesn’t really have his heart in being the doctor of a small berg. He feels a need to go back to scientific research, so his wife accommodates him. They pull up stakes and return to academia.
Part of the charm of these early sequences is how the married couple gets on and adjusts to different situations. As Colman’s character becomes more renowned in the field of medical research, he is seen as someone who can once again help people in a remote community.
This eventually leads to him accepting a post in a third-world island country. At first, he doesn’t want to take his wife along with him on the journey, but she insists on joining him. Hayes does a particularly good job showing how a wife earnestly wants to help her husband. She is not a nag or any sort of serious impediment to his career ambitions.
The island sequence reminded me a bit of Maugham’s THE PAINTED VEIL, where a doctor is trying to eradicate a plague. In this case, quite a few people are dying. There’s a heartbreaking scene with a native mother and her baby. Back at their residence, Colman’s personal life is affected by the epidemic when Hayes takes ill. Hayes has a boffo death scene, that surprisingly is not done too over the top. This performance is right on par with Hayes’ Oscar winning work in THE SIN OF MADELON CLAUDET, produced the same year.
After Hayes’ death, Colman leaves the island a broken man. He returns to a good city job working in a lab, but he is still unfulfilled. Also, he feels as if he had wavered from his scientific pursuits on the island. He is a restless soul, and even the possibility of a second wife (Myrna Loy) doesn’t seem to help boost his spirits much. In fact, he ends up rejecting Loy and going off to another small community in Vermont.
When all was said and done, I didn’t feel as if I really understood Colman’s character. Perhaps part of that was how the screenwriter translated him from Sinclair Lewis’ novel. But I just couldn’t decide if he was a modest hero, or else a vain idealist who always seemed to get it wrong. Nonetheless, Colman does a fantastic job, and it is still a motion picture worth seeing.
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