The 1951 comedy “People Will Talk” (which I discuss in the clip above) treated a subject that had long fascinated its writer and director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Before going to Hollywood, Joseph Mankiewicz was a precocious pre-med student at Columbia (he graduated at nineteen). According to his biographer, Kenneth L. Geist (whose book is called “Pictures Will Talk”), he was obsessed by medicine all his life—he “was fond of going to watch his friend Dr. Marcus Rabwin operate at Los Angeles County Hospital,” subscribed to M.D. magazine, and kept up with the supplements to “Physician’s Desk Reference”:
Yet Mankiewicz’s film was far from a mere paean to pills and their pushers; on the contrary, the protagonist, a doctor (played by Cary Grant), treats his patients as people—body, mind, and soul—and understands that his practice involves death as well as life, both of which he approaches with an intimate yet robust aestheticism. The doctor is an artist as well—an amateur conductor, who puts lots of heart into his performances—and an impulsive, adventuresome, overgrown child, whose natural innocence and sure moral compass animate his exacting science. That’s how he approaches the pregnant yet unmarried patient (Jeanne Crain) who falls in love with him, and how he—long ago—got mixed-up with a secondary character who is the movie’s fixed center, its opaque and rock-like core, and a living mystery, the seeming marker at the boundary of this world and the next (in a capsule review of the film, I compare him to the Commendatore from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”) and the trigger of its dénouement. (I wrote about the movie when it screened at BAM last summer.) It’s a romance filled with comedy that ranges from the blithe to the angrily satirical—yet it’s one of the most aesthetically sophisticated movies ever to emerge from the high-studio era.
