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PSYCHIATRY

Doctors have had a raw deal at the movies. At best they tend to be portrayed as one scalpel short of a successful operation, at worst, well, take your pick. The same goes for phobia-sufferers, rarely offered even a pipette’s worth of tea and sympathy by film-makers. The good news is that whatever the anxiety, real or imagined, the Movie Doctors are here to help. Nurse Ratched, please show the next patient in, mwah ha ha . . .

MAD DOCTORS IN THE MOVIES

A Clinical Examination

The poster for the 1981 rock musical Shock Treatment tells us much about cinema’s essentially suspicious attitude toward medicine: a still of a crazed-looking Richard O’Brien leering at us through bottle-top glasses, with the tag line, ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor.’ O’Brien plays Dr Cosmo McKinley, an utterly unscrupulous (and very likely unqualified) physician who, along with his equally dubious sister Dr Nation McKinley, is engaged in a scam to send poor Brad Majors to their own private funny farm. Duped, drugged and duly ‘diagnosed’, Brad is summarily strapped into a straitjacket and thrown, bound and gagged, into an isolated cell, while fast food tycoon Farley Flavors conspires to steal away his life, his identity and (most importantly) his wife.

The film is a very modern comedy (it pretty much predicted the rise of reality TV), but like its predecessor, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), it pays cine-literate homage to a grand heritage of cinema – a heritage in which movie doctors (as opposed to ‘The Movie Doctors’) have been repeatedly portrayed on screen as little more than licensed psychos.

One source of inspiration for Shock Treatment was Robert Wiene’s 1920 chiller The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which used expressionist sets and shadowy lighting to conjure a vision of a sinister sideshow hypnotist who sends his somnambulist patient out into the world to do his darkest bidding. In a surprise twist, Caligari turns out to be an inmate’s imagined evil version of the director of the asylum wherein he is confined, and the film ends with the director announcing that he can now cure his delusional patient. Yet more often than not, movie doctors are anything but curative. In The Mad Doctor (1940), Basil Rathbone plays a medic who murders his wives. In The Abominable Doctor Phibes (1971), Vincent Price is a music and theology specialist who murders the medical doctors he blames for killing his wife. Starting to see a pattern here?

MEDICAL TOP TRUMPS

Who Would You Like to See by Your Bedside?

Think about it: if someone asks you to name a famous screen physician, you’re more likely to come up with the murder suspects of Doctor X’s medical academy than the jovially roguish interns of Doctor in the House (1954). This is true across a wide range of medical disciplines. Is cinema’s most famous nurse Barbara Windsor’s lovable Nurse Sandra May from Carry on Doctor (1967), or Louise Fletcher’s sadistic Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)? Cinema’s favourite dentist? No contest – Laurence Olivier as escaped Nazi Dr Christian Szell who tortures Dustin Hoffman with an assortment of whirring drills while asking, ‘Is it safe? Is it safe?’ As for cinema’s best psychiatrist, look no further than Anthony Hopkins as Dr Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991, and its various sequels/prequels), the doctor who decided to stop treating his patients and start eating them instead. (We’ll overlook the fact that Brian Cox actually originated the Hannibal the Cannibal role in Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986), a film which remains the best adaption of any Thomas Harris novel.)

Everywhere you look, the movies are full of terrible medical role models doing things no doctor should, from Vincent Price’s pathologist Dr Warren Chapin accidentally setting a centipede-like terror-parasite loose in 1959’s ‘Percepto’-enhanced shocker The Tingler (‘When the screen screams, you’ll scream too . . . if you value your life!’) to Jeffrey Combs’s medical student Herbert West messing around with undead decapitated heads in Stuart Gordon’s disgustingly scrungy Re-Animator (1985). Even when portrayed sympathetically on screen, medics usually have a touch of madness about them. Perhaps the most heroic doctors of modern movies are Donald Sutherland’s ‘Hawkeye’ Pierce and Elliott Gould’s ‘Trapper John’ McIntyre in MASH, both of whom spend most of the movie battling to retain their sanity by indulging in ever crazier acts of war-torn madness, spiced up by ‘Suicide is Painless’ singalongs. Meanwhile, Donald Pleasence’s Dr Sam Loomis may be the nominal ‘good guy’ in John Carpenter’s 1978 stalk-and-slash smash Halloween, but his character somehow manages to be the creepiest thing on screen. No wonder they kept bringing him back for the sequels.

There are, of course, examples of charming, attractive and basically decent doctors in cinema: think of Lew Ayres as dashing Dr Kildare in a string of movies from the thirties and forties (Calling Dr Kildare, The Secret of Dr Kildare, Dr Kildare’s Strange Case, Dr Kildare Goes Home etc); of Omar Sharif as Doctor Zhivago in David Lean’s timelessly sweeping 1965 historical romance; or even of Robin Williams as the loveable Patch Adams, merrily waving his bottom at the medical establishment as he proves that laughter can be a cure for almost anything (the Movie Doctors concur on this point – see ‘Laughing Gas’, p.46). Sometimes the casting can be a little credibility-stretching. Did anybody really buy Meg Ryan as a heart surgeon communing with heavenly creatures in the syrupy City of Angels (1998)? Or Keanu Reeves as a dashing doctor with the hots for Diane Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give (2003)? Or Gael García Bernal making white-coated goo-goo eyes at Kate Hudson in A Little Bit of Heaven (2011), a ‘romantic fantasy’ which included the unforgettable valentine card greeting ‘Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, I’ve Got Ass Cancer . . .’? These doctors were unconvincing, but also unthreatening. Yet since the birth of the moving image, we’ve been more than ready to see doctors as little more than mad scientists, with patients their (often unwilling) test tubes.

Two key texts underwrite cinema’s long-standing nervousness about bad science and even worse medicine: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Both proved terrifyingly popular novels, and have been endlessly adapted and reinterpreted on screen, striking a chilling chord with cinema audiences. As early as 1908, Otis Turner’s production of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde established the figure of the physician who fails to heal himself (in the book he’s actually a research chemist) as a beastly cinema staple. Umpteen adaptations followed, with John Barrymore famously taking the title role in John S. Robertson’s 1920 silent, Fredric March winning an Oscar for his portrayal of the mad doctor in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 version, and Spencer Tracy co-starring alongside Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner in the 1941 remake of Mamoulian’s hit, which again drew heavily on Thomas Russell Sullivan’s stage play. As the movie adaptations multiplied, so Hyde’s crimes worsened, his character becoming weirdly conflated (as it had been in theatrical productions) with the legend of Jack the Ripper, cementing the cinematic archetype of the monstrous doctor.

As for Frankenstein, an early screen version produced by the Edison company saw director J. Searle Dawley laying the template for the bubbling cauldrons and magical hocus-pocus that would define mad screen doctors and scientists for decades to come. Other famous adaptations of Shelley’s text included James Whale’s legendary 1931 production in which Colin Clive memorably screams ‘It’s alive!’; Hammer’s studio-defining 1957 shocker The Curse of Frankenstein with Peter Cushing as Victor and Christopher Lee as his ungodly creation; and Kenneth Branagh’s much-maligned 1994 reboot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein which proved that being a mad doctor hell-bent on resurrecting deceased body parts didn’t mean you couldn’t be ripped. The movie bombed after director/star Branagh was berated by critics for making Victor a hunk who spent a lot of time running around with his shirt off. In fact, Ken’s youthful portrayal was closer to Shelley’s source than the ageing, tweedy weirdos who had become the stock-in-trade of cinema adaptations.

Of course, these early screen ‘doctors’ were often more mad scientists than medics, the confusion and conflation of the two being an integral part of cinema’s approach to both professions. As far as cinema audiences were concerned, there was a very thin line between ‘making people better’ and attempting to ‘play God’, and turn-of-the-century advances in both science and medicine merely added to this sense of unease. It’s no coincidence that the birth of cinema itself was tied up with the growing use of electricity, a mysterious power of which everyone was aware but few understood. With its roots in the phantasmagorical magic lantern displays of the carnival sideshow, early cinema exploited its audience’s fascination with (and fear of) electricity, with Doctors Frankenstein and Rotwang employing spectacular electrostatic arcs to breathe unnatural life into their respective creations.

Other medical developments which have inspired some freakishly disturbing films include the transplantation of organs, research into which flourished in the bloody aftermath of the First World War. In 1924, Robert Wiene’s Austrian gem The Hands of Orlac attached the fingers of a murderer onto the body of Conrad Veidt’s formerly peaceful pianist, setting in motion a string of transplant-based horrors which would flourish throughout the twentieth century. Several adaptations and re-imaginings of Maurice Renard’s 1920 potboiler Les Mains d’Orlac followed, most famously Karl Freund’s Mad Love (1935), in which former Frankenstein Colin Clive played Stephen Orlac, while Peter Lorre leered menacingly as a lovestruck Doctor Gogol. (‘Suitable Only for Adults’ declared the poster for Mad Love, in which Lorre’s staring eyes epitomised the cinematic spectre of the ever-so-slightly deranged doctor.) In 1960, an Anglo-French production of The Hands of Orlac was shot simultaneously in French and English, co-stars Mel Ferrer and Christopher Lee taking great pride in their ability to perform their roles in both languages, while the 1962 American horror Hands of a Stranger told this now familiar story once again under the lurid tag line: ‘The surgeon’s scalpel writes a thriller!’

The early seventies saw a spate of Orlac-inspired transplant shockers such as The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant, in which a child-like man has the head of a psycho killer grafted onto his body, and The Thing With Two Heads, in which a dying white racist wakes up with his severed head attached to the body of a black death-row convict. Most bizarrely, the 1970 sexploiter The Amazing Transplant attributed the sudden rapist urges of its central character to the attachment of a brand new penis, which apparently had a mind of its own. A similar scenario resurfaced in the 1971 British film Percy, which proudly boasted ‘music by The Kinks!’

In Michael Crichton’s 1978 thriller Coma, patients at an apparently caring hospital would be drugged into a state of suspended animation and then harvested for body parts to be sold to the highest bidder, a paranoid fantasy which struck a nerve with a public becoming increasingly disturbed by urban myths about organ theft (a myth that was still going strong when Stephen Frears made the black-market body-parts thriller Dirty Pretty Things in 2002).

Just as cinema has always been innately suspicious of organ transplants, so film-makers would also leap upon genetic engineering as a way of getting under their audience’s skin. The key text here is Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls, adapted from H.G. Wells’s nineteenth-century novel The Island of Doctor Moreau in 1932, and long refused a certificate by the BBFC on the grounds that its subject matter was ‘against nature’ (it has since been reclassified as an uncut ‘PG’ – how times change. See p.196). Charles Laughton excelled as the bad doctor who dreams of cross-breeding animals and humans, while Kathleen Burke’s animal charms graced eye-catching posters which promised that ‘THE PANTHER WOMAN lured men on – only to destroy them body and soul!’ Despite the censors’ anxieties, the figure of Dr Moreau has proven another popular cinematic staple, resurfacing regularly as the embodiment of twisted medical madness, played by such stars as Burt Lancaster in Don Taylor’s 1977 adaptation, and Marlon Brando in John Frankenheimer’s 1996 version. If you look hard enough, you can just about spot the ghost of Dr Moreau in the figure of Dieter Laser’s Dr Heiter from Tom Six’s repulsive The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009), a movie which reminds us that even in the twenty-first-century, doctors are viewed as twisted madmen by the cinemagoing public.

So, have the movies been bad for medicine? Well, not entirely. In his terrific 2005 book Mad, Bad or Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema, Professor Sir Christopher Frayling points out that ‘Horror films have had some very unexpected social consequences, just like the research they are depicting, even within the scientific community.’ In particular, Frayling points to the legacy of the 1931 Frankenstein, which unexpectedly inspired a medical breakthrough by Dr Jean B. Rosenbaum of New Mexico. According to Frayling, ‘the idea of the first cardiac pacemaker came to him in 1951 when he recalled being scared out of his wits as a child by the laboratory scene in James Whale’s Frankenstein

. . . The memory of electricity stimulating Karloff’s body as he twitched into life on the slab led directly to his invention of the pacemaker.’

All of which means that if you are one of the many people whose lives have been immeasurably improved by the insertion of a small but effective heart regulator, then you owe your good health to the healing power of cinema in general, and horror movies in particular!

As the Movie Doctors like to say: It’s alive!

AND RELAX

How the Movies Can Relieve Stress and Anxiety

Modern Life, so Blur taught us, is rubbish. If that is taking it a little too far, modern life is certainly stressful. Your job prospects, your bank balance, your parents, your housemates, your deadlines, your kids and your ailments are just the start of it. Then there’s the government, other governments, terror threats, international financial insecurity, global warming and films shown in the wrong aspect ratio (see p.110). Life is so complicated.

Many turn to alcohol, drugs and decadence. This is understandable – there are times when the Movie Doctors have been known to seek solace in the adult beverage cupboard. This section exists to point to a road less travelled. When those anxious moments take hold, when the burden of the day seems off the scale, watch a movie. Watch the right movie. Here are some stress-busters we can prescribe that should have the desired effect. Lie back, breathe deeply, press play.

84 CHARING CROSS ROAD (1987)

(Includes spoilers, on the sound basis that you really don’t want any surprises.)

The only way this won’t work is if you find the idea of two old people reading letters aloud to each other for 100 minutes a bit too racy. Then you might struggle. For everyone else, welcome to the world of antique books. Usually you might expect the cinematic treatment of ancient, dusty tomes to include at least a murdered thirteenth-century monk hell bent on revenge on the first modern reader it can find (usually a blousy woman up to no good). But not here. Anne Bancroft stars – and we all know she can blouse if she wants to – but in David Jones’s film of Helene Hanff’s bestseller (via James Roose-Evans’s play), all she wants is books. Not just any books, but rare books, the kind of books that Anthony Hopkins sells. She writes to him. He replies. She thanks him for his reply, he sends more books. They never meet. He dies.

Bancroft and Hopkins are, of course, wonderful. She is a struggling writer and therefore difficult and feisty. He is the manager of the bookshop and therefore studious and quiet. Very few actors do stillness like Sir Anthony, and his portrayal of Frank Doe is a study in self-containment.

A transatlantic love story where the protagonists don’t share a single scene is a gentle, warming, noble experience. Maybe your relationships would have been easier if you’d never actually met anyone, just experienced the whole thing – as here – in voice-over? Cleaner and neater all round.