The big day has finally arrived! Dr. Jimmy Kildare is finally marrying Nurse Mary Lamont, and all his friends in the hospital are preparing for the big day. Dr. Gillespie is occupied with helping a well-known orchestra conductor who thinks he's going deaf, but that's not all Gillespie's busy with: he's also trying his best to talk and scheme his way out of going to cancer specialist Dr. Lockburg's sanitarium for a month. Everything's going just beautifully, until an utterly unexpected tragedy strikes the night before the wedding. Now it's up to good old Gillespie to bring Jimmy back to some semblance of reality.
This might be my all-time favorite in the Kildare series so far; I still have one more to go, plus five in the Gillespie series that I have yet to see. But one of the things that make this one so interesting is the musical theme inherent in the plot. Lionel Barrymore composed the music for this one, and plays it on the piano himself too. In real life, Lionel had a high regard for classical music and knew a lot about many famous composers. He composed some music himself, claiming that much of it was actually "stolen from real composers" (the way he states it in his autobiography "We Barrymores", written in 1951), and played the piano as well as the oboe!
So all that serves to contribute to a most interesting and well-above average entry for the Kildare series. I have always referred to Lionel as an acting genius, and it was funny to hear him call himself a genius in this movie, through the character of Gillespie of course.
It's also fascinating to discover a bit more about Dr. Gillespie's background and personal life. He talks about a girl he used to love, and how he ended up losing her...sounding much the same as what Kildare is going through when he tells him. He talks about how another brilliant, famous doctor helped him during that difficult time and convinced him to continue his career instead of giving up, and it also appears that Gillespie comes from a pretty well-to-do background, this being revealed when he asks Kildare to meet him somewhere to talk, and gives him the address for a big, lovely, rambling old house that turns out to be "the old Gillespie Place", his childhood home.
So sit back, relax, and enjoy one of the best films the series had to offer!
