People will Talk

 People will Talk is an unclassifiable picture released in 1951 starring Cary Grant and Jeanne Crain.  Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz after his great success with All About Eve, Twentieth Cent\ury Fox apparently granted the director carte blanche to make any picture that he wanted.  The result is an eccentric movie, much more interesting in its parts than in sum.  The film is beautifully made and splendidly performed, but is akin to Shakespeare's "problem plays" -- a knotty, gnarled sort of movie that becomes easily distracted by its own philosophical premises.  It's fascinating to see a big budget Hollywood vehicle of this sort, obviously pitched as a romantic comedy, stretching and straining at the limits of its genre.  Mankiewicz intends something important and intensely significant with this movie, but it has too many ideas and, more than a few of them are hare-brained.  

People will Talk bears many traces of its rather bizarre German origin.  The movie adapts for the screen a German play produced in 1934, Der Frauenartzt dr. med. Hiob Praetorius (The Gynecologist Dr. Hiob Praetorius).  In the movie, students show their admiration for an instructor by stomping on the floor of the lecture hall; everyone eats sauerkraut and bratwurst; and the hero, played by Cary Grant, is also (improbably enough) a conductor of classical music who is shown leading an orchestra that looks as if it were assembled in Munich to play Brahm's Academic Overture and Wagner's "Prize Song" from Der Meistersinger.  The situations portrayed in the film have a vaguely Teutonic aspect.  (The original play was written by a German comedian, famous in the slapstick era, named Curt Goetz.)  Although the movie is ostensibly set in the Midwest, this is a puzzling place that seems more like some version of rural Germany than America.  

Jeanne Crain plays a woman who is auditing one of Dr. Noah Praetorius' anatomy classes.  As Praetorius provides a philosophical disquisition on death, spoken over the very attractive and plump corpse of a young woman, Crain's character, Deborah Higgins faints.  Praetorius runs some tests on the young woman at this clinic.  (Praetorius is some kind of guest lecturer at the medical school, runs his own very successful and elite clinic located in what seems a kind of Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie House, and moonlights as the sardonic demanding director of the college's symphony orchestra.)  Praetorius discovers that Deborah is pregnant, the result of a one-night stand or possibly a very brief relationship with a soldier or sailor who has been killed.  Praetorius is a mysterious figure -- he is claimed to be a miracle worker and his patients often demonstrate amazing recoveries from the various ailments that afflict them.  Furthering the sense of enigma surrounding Praetorius is his close relationship with an older man, the rather stolid, husky Mr. Shunderson.  No one knows why Mr. Shunderson, a drab nondescript nonentity, and Dr. Praetorius are inseparable but there are apparently sinister rumors circulating about the bond between the two.  A rival doctor played by Hume Cronyn is investigating Praetorius' background, hoping to establish that the miracle-worker is some kind of quack or charlatan.  (The paranoid scenes involving the investigation are thought to relate to the McCarthy senate inquiries then current).  After Deborah attempts suicide, she is confined to Praetorius' tony clinic, where, of course, the good doctor falls in love with her.  After she is released, he travels to the farm where she lives with her father and his brother and proposes.  Shunderson comes with him and, indeed, he goes everywhere with the physician, hovering nearby, doing his bidding as a man-servant and almost never speaking.  Deborah's family is a bit gothic -- her uncle is a patriotic, right wing moron and her father is a self-avowed failure; he says that everything he has touched he has ruined.  The family has a vicious dog named Beelzebub, a snarling collie who is tamed by the kindly, mysterious Mr. Shunderson.  Deborah accepts Praetorius offer of marriage -- he proposes to her in a sterile-looking milking parlor on the farm.  They are married but their lives are complicated by Deborah's pregnancy (Praetorius has told her that the test was wrong and she is not pregnant but this is a lie) and the investigation of the doctor's background.  On the evening that the symphony concert directed by Praetorius is scheduled, the doctor is hauled into an adversarial meeting and cross-examined by his bitter rival.  All secrets are revealed and the hero is vindicated. Praetorius rushes to the concert hall where he vivaciously directs Brahm's Academic Overture and everyone sings the Gaudeamus igitur.  The baby leaps in Deborah's womb.  Mr. Shunderson, who it turns out has been resurrected from the grave, sits peacefully in the corner with Beelzebub now tamely reposing at his side.

This is very strange stuff.  Praetorius isn't idealized; he's snarky, arrogant, and demanding.  (He even bullies the poor members of his orchestra; Grant isn't afraid to play against type and he is often unsympathetic and nasty).  Furthermore, Praetorius lies to Deborah about her pregnancy -- when she figures out she is pregnant after being married, she assumes its Praetorius' child (but it's not).  It' not clear why Praetorius tells this whopper and one would think that a marriage founded upon this sort of deception might be headed for trouble.  The movie implies that the investigation focusing on Praetorius is based upon his providing gynecological services as an abortionist -- this is hinted but never explicitly developed.  The film also suggests that Shunderson may be Praetorius' homosexual consort or, possibly, even some kind devil with whom the doctor has made a sinister deal -- he can work miracles in exchange for his soul.  (The actual explanation as to Shunderson's relationship with Praetorius is ridiculous, disturbing, and so implausible as to wreck the movie.)  By far, the best part of the movie is its opening half-hour.  There are some truly alarming sequences in that part of the film -- Praetorius' lecture over the corpse of the young woman, his conversation about death and whether dying is painful with a woman who is on her deathbed, the suicide scene with Deborah and the images of Hume Cronyn, a wizened little homunculus, conspiring against Praetorius on the basis of what seems to be naked jealousy -- Cronyn is little and ugly compared to the tall, avuncular and gorgeous Praetorius.  The latter two-thirds of the movie set about solving the Shunderson mystery (people call him "the bat") and much of that part of the film seems to be intended as light comedy -- there are amusing scenes with Walter Slezak who plays, in the orchestra with difficulty, a bass fiddle; Slezak is an European atomic physicist and there's lots of banter with him about music and his huge instrument.  Scenes with Deborah's father, who concedes his fecklessness, are also disturbingly masochistic.  

The opening episode demonstrates the potential power that the film that the picture can't sustain.  Hume Cronyn has called a middle-aged woman, a battle-ax, into his office to interrogate her about Praetorius.  She demands that the door be kept open, implicitly accusing Cronyn of sexual designs on her.  (This seems improbable and an instance of unreasonable vanity in that the part is played by Margaret Hamilton who acted the role of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.)  The woman talks about how Dr. Praetorius miraculously cured his patients by "talking to them" -- it seems that Praetorius is a giant walking-talking placebo of some sort, a notion that is plausible since the part is played Cary Grant.  But, then, when it comes time to talk about "the Bat", Mr. Shunderson, the woman demands that the door be shut -- some things are too awful to be discussed in public.  This is an exceptionally evocative and well-made scene that traces its own dramatic arc (door open to door shut) and it starts the movie with a bang -- I suspect the scene is very closely adapted from the source play by Herr Goetz.  Unfortunately, the movie, although always compelling, ultimately ruptures under the weight of its own ambitions -- it's about too many things at once:  feminism and women's health, medicine, McCarthyist persecution, friendship, love, romance, death, and music.  But People will Talk does have a fine and satisfying happy ending.  (The name Dr. Noah Praetorius is a little risible -- did no one remember that Dr. Praetorius played by a very gay Ernest Thesiger acted as the mad doctor in The Bride of Frankenstein?)