Internes Can't Take Money

1937

Action / Crime / Drama / Romance

5
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 55% · 1 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 55%
IMDb Rating 6.9/10 10 911 911

gangster bank robber ex-con missing child dr. kildare

Plot summary

Dr. Kildare treats and falls for impoverished ex-con Janet Haley, widow of a bank robber, who can't find her baby. Later she helps Kildare sew up gangster Hanlon in a tavern back room. Kildare pursues Janet and enlists Hanlon to help her; the gangster's solution, not surprisingly, is violent.

Director

Alfred Santell Photo
Alfred Santell

Top cast

Irving Bacon Photo
Irving Bacon as Jeff
Pierre Watkin Photo
Pierre Watkin as Dr. Fearson
Ellen Drew Photo
Ellen Drew as Nurse
Lloyd Nolan Photo
Lloyd Nolan as Hanlon
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
725.55 MB
978*720
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 18 min
Seeds ...
1.31 GB
1456*1072
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 18 min
Seeds 1

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by rfkeser 8 / 10

B plot + A production = Dr. Kildare with atmosphere

An exceptionally flavorful rendering of the Depression atmosphere: a world of the poor laboring in sweatshop jobs, petty hoods hanging out in smoky bars, backroom bookie joints, pushcart vendors and bus terminals and orphanages. While the plot is no more ambitious than the typical B movie of the time, the high production values, name cast, and imaginative direction from Alfred Santell all boost the quality.At the center of the plot, Barbara Stanwyck spends much of the film in desperation mode, exhausted from searching for her lost child, beaten down by two years in jail, forced to hire stool pigeons, forced to stay alert.Joel McCrea makes the ideal American hero for the 30's: not only a doctor, but tall, blond, honest, sincere, manly, and progressive. At one point, he has to perform an operation on a bar room table, improvising with violin strings, an ice pick, and a bottle of rum! But this is not MGM's Dr. Kildare. He has no warm relationship with a kindly old mentor; instead, the chief doctor is an authority figure upholding the rules, dismissing Lee Bowman for unauthorized experimentation. The script also pumps up sympathy for interns as underpaid workers who get only $10 a month.As a gangster, the always fascinating Stanley Ridges conveys the calm of a man secure in his power, whose eye movements size up his adversaries and whose silences reveal more menace than mere words. Watch the sexual innuendo he finds in his "I didn't always like popcorn" speech.Santell uses extreme close-ups and moves the camera often, aided by gleaming lighting from Theodore Sparkuhl, plus some knock-out sets, including a sparkling white Art Deco clinic and an elaborately detailed New York Irish bar. Watch how economically Santell works to show the awakening of mutual attraction between Stanwyck and McCrea in their first scene together. Also lifting the picture out of its formula origins is the headlong pace Santell maintains to the climax, an urgency lost in the blander MGM series.
Reviewed by mark.waltz 5 / 10

Paramount's solo entry in the "Dr. Kildare" series minus Gillespie and other MGM characters.

This film appears to take place somewhere after the first "Dr. Kildare" movie at MGM which established James Kildare as a recently graduated medical student chosen by the gruff Dr. Gillespie (Lionel Barrymore) to be his assistant. The grumpy elderly doctor isn't there, neither is the stern but goodhearted nurse played by Alma Kruger, her assistant played by Laraine Day, and most missed, the wise-cracking receptionist played by Marie Blake. But, this is obviously New York City, late 30's, and Gillespie is already a hard-working intern, who is seen in an early scene defending a fellow intern about to be fired. He takes care of a burn victim (Barbara Stanwyck), and is drawn (as he would be in the MGM series as played by Lew Ayres) into her scandalous past which has her as the widow of a bank robber who had her baby taken away from her when she went to prison, wrongly accused of being a part of the dead husband's criminal activities. Now out of prison, Stanwyck needs $1000 to get information as to the whereabouts of her baby, and gets help from Kildare who is probably the biggest hearted intern ever to step foot into a New York City hospital.In the short 78 minutes that this medical drama takes to unravel, there is a lot of filler, but most of it is simple slice of life drama with dollops of humour. One intern is seen telling an overweight socialite to exercise, and suggests starting by pulling herself away from the dining table, while later, another matron is told when asked how to take care of sea sickness that when it happens, she'll know what to do. Kildare breaks medical laws by treating gangster Lloyd Nolan's stab wound, finds himself paid off, which leads to a dramatic scene where Stanwyck tries to get the money from him so she can pay the crooked lawyer to find her baby. Stanwyck, already a huge star by the time this came out, admirably took on this "B" picture and comes off quite nicely. She is more the focus than McCrea's noble Kildare is, although if anyone was going to play him other than Lew Ayres, McCrea would be it. Such other well-known character actors as Charles Lane and an eye-patched Irving Bacon have nice cameos, and "Ma Hardy" herself (Fay Holden) appears briefly as the kind-hearted nun whom Stanwyck consults to find her child. Overall, an entertaining "B" melodrama that may not be as remembered as the MGM series which followed (and the much later TV series), but is definitely worth including in the study of this series, and for the presence of its major stars who were an excellent on-screen team in several films.
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