Lowell Sherman is a doctor and surgeon in New York City who gets kicked out -- quietly -- for taking money at a free hospital for promising extras for his patients. He heads out to Chicago, where he sets up, despite no training, as a plastic surgeon. Doctors are not permitted to advertise -- he gets his name in the paper anyway, he lectures nationwide on the radio, he writes a column in the newspaper. Women come flocking to him and it isn't until the real doctors come down on him that he is arrested for malpractice.
The audience at the Museum of Modern Art didn't care much for this movie, because .... well, I thought it was better than most of them did. About eighty years ago, one of my grandfathers opened a butter-and-eggs store. Every morning, the housewives would come in and ask if there was anything special. After a while he put a crate of eggs under the counter and when asked, would produce these. "Double-candled," he would explain. For these, instead of a dime a dozen, he got twelve cents. More recently, I was speaking with a niece about a problem, and noted that not all problems have solutions. "That's pessimistic!" she chided me. I shrugged.
Lowell Sherman's black-hearted Pre-Code scoundrel -- his specialty in the movies at least since Griffith's WAY DOWN EAST -- knows that people believe they can have what they want, and that anyone who tells them they can't is, like all the other doctors in this movie, who decry Sherman's methods, in a conspiracy to deprive them of their just deserts. It's not just medicine; look at cosmetics, or perfumes, or even politics -- if I may bring up the subject -- in which far too many people will believe anyone of expertise who promises them what they want, even if it makes no sense, and blame its unavailability on some malign conspiracy, that the spellbinder will deliver.
Well, best not to get into politics here, given that the people at the Museum would never fall for that line -- just some other. Sherman is good in his role as the stinker, Berton Churchill is fine as his more cautious accomplice and there are plenty of Pre-Code ladies doing things that they could only do for a few years before the Code clamped down.
