Candied Corpses

The Young Doctors (United Artists) is a dissecting-room meller that offers any moviegoer with the stomach for it a slice of hospital life. True, the story has been sliced twice before. Author Arthur Hailey first told it in a TV play (No Deadly Medicine), later in a novel (The Final Diagnosis). In the hands of Scriptwriter Joseph Hayes, the slice begins to seem a shade too thin.

The plot centers on a clash of principles and personalities between a messy old dear of a pathologist (Fredric March) and the slick young bug-detective (Ben Gazzara) called in to ease him out. The new boy is appalled by the unscientific squalor he finds in the pathology lab, which is one of the principal diagnostic tools in any hospital's kit. He lights a hot fire under March, but the old boy stubbornly refuses to budge. "My face is turning purple trying to swallow you," he rages, "but I will! I'm staying!" And the young man just as stubbornly replies: "So am I!"

Sundered by pride, the two men suddenly find themselves united in suffering. Tragedy strikes both at once. A nurse the young doctor loves falls ill with--cancer? --and the old doctor's heart goes out to the young man in his agony. At the same time the old doctor makes a careless mistake that may cost him his license and a child its life, and the young doctor's heart goes out to the old man in his despair.

As conceived, the story has dramatic force and psychological acuity. As realized, the film shows a distressing tendency to candy its corpses, and the climax is a mere placebo. Hayes's scene writing is often crude, and Phil (The Secret Way) Karlson's direction is sometimes downright amateur. He repeatedly misplaces his camera and clumsily misdirects his actors. He cannot rattle Actor March, who after a career of 33 years and 65 films stands almost without rival as a creative cinemactor. But the director thoroughly demoralizes Actor Gazzara--at best a humorless performer, he seems in this role to think of himself as a sort of galling Dr. Killjoy. Disk Jockey Dick Clark, who plays an intern in The Young Doctors, reads the lines with his usual fishy smile and oily mikeside manner. He obviously imagines that a medical man is just another kind of medicine man. that a doctor is no more than a slipped-disk jockey.

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