King's Row. 1942. Directed by Sam Wood.

(8/21/01)

I have heard some films described as "soap operas." King's Row might fit that description. I had the feeling that the events of this film could occupy a daily TV serial for about six months. And that's a problem because the result is that the film overwhelms one with material and none of it has much of a chance to make a deep impression.

Individual scenes are certainly touching, but the film as a whole didn't make much of an impact on me emotionally. It all went rushing by. Then, too, I was at a disadvantage because I already knew about the big shock of the picture--that a mean-spirited surgeon amputates a man's legs unnecessarily. So the impact of that was lost on me.

I had the feeling that there was just too much of the grotesque in the town of King's Row to ring true. But I wonder if that is so. There is the sadistic surgeon and there is the tragedy of a man who marries an insane woman and has a daughter whom he tries to keep from the world because of her latent insanity. Then he kills her and himself because the young doctor he is training wants to marry her. Well, maybe all that is a little bit much. Anyway, it seems strange because this is a respectable production which outwardly looks like a slice of small-town life at the turn of the century. It doesn't look like it was meant to be a horror film or anything similar.

It is certainly a fine production with all the resources of the Warner Brothers' studio in full force. I am surprised, however, that I found Erich Wolfgang Korngold's music annoying in places.

Claude Rains was excellent as the doctor. Mysterious, forbidding, yet strangely likable he is a character we really don't come to understand until he is dead. I think it is possibly one of Rains' best roles. Robert Cummings is almost an archetype of American innocence--warm, open-hearted and somewhat bewildered when faced with evil and/or corruption. I am tempted to say that he is ingenuousness personified, though there is one scene that he doesn't quite bring off.

I believe that King's Row is the film for which Ronald Reagan is best known and it is a fine performance. At first I thought he was something of a con artist a la Jack Carson as Hugo Barnstead. (That from the sequence where he wants to marry one woman, but has to excuse his stepping out with someone else.) Then he shows himself to be a steadfast friend to Robert Cummings and then he becomes an embittered amputee. Reagan pulls it all off as he does the finale in which Cummings finally tells him the truth about what happened to him. It is a great finale to the film and it took me totally by surprise.

I was impressed, I should add, by the conflict Cummings has when he discovers the truth about the surgeon amputating his friend's legs unnecessarily. He wants to cover it up, thinking that his friend will not be able to handle the truth, and is tempted to have the surgeon's daughter committed to an institution rather than allowing her to tell what she knows--which she needs to do for the sake of her own mental health. Cummings goes through an agonizing ethical conflict which is fascinating for the audience. (And I'd like to emphasize how strange I think it was for Warner Brothers to make a major film with such grotesque subject matter as a surgeon amputating someone's legs needlessly and maliciously.)

And it was certainly nice to see Judith Anderson adding her own special intensity as that surgeon's wife and--later--widow.