MOVIE OF THE DAY: "DARK DELUSION" (1947)

It's always fun to watch old medical-based movies. Procedures taken for granted by naive audiences then would be grounds for malpractice today. It's a real hoot, too, when watching these melodramas since my wife's a nurse. They make her gasp, "Oh my God!" more than the investors in Malaysian Airways.  

Dark Delusion ups the entertainment value by exploring the world of mental illness, presumably a ripe topic after the success of Hitchcock's Spellbound two years earlier. But while the latter strove to be a serious, mature take on one man's psychological breakdown, Dark Delusion is Freud by way of M-G-M's Department of Romantic Melodrama.

"She may be crazy, but she's my  kind
of crazy!"

Dr. Tommy Coalt is a headstrong sawbones who's been quite successful at alienating patients and hospital management alike. Sent to the fictional New York suburb of Bayhurst to temporarily replace the town's only doctor, he immediately becomes entangled in the case of Cynthia Grace. 

Cynthia has a psychological condition that makes her appear to be photographed in semi-shadow even when in direct sunlight, and her every move accompanied by a woozy organ, glockenspiel, and off-key violins. But speaking professionally, she's all kinds of maniac -- depressive, klepto, and pyro topping the list. While her father wants her admitted to the local laughing academy, Coalt ultimately proves that she's no crazier than anyone else in town. That, of course, isn't saying much.

"I now pronounce you man and lung."

Tommy's a nice guy once you get to know him. He even plays cupid when he's not alienating people. One young woman hospitalized for polio wants to break off her engagement, until Tommy convinces her that her fiance has absolutely no problem being married to someone who's living in an iron lung. And thus we are allowed to witness the most bizarre wedding scene in movie history before Chained for Life, starring real-life Siamese twins Violet and Daisy Hilton.

But Tommy is fully aware of his professional standards. When talking to a newly-adoptive mother, Tommy notices she has baggy eyes, so he prescribes her sleeping pills. When Cynthia shows up unexpectedly at his office, he slips tranquilizers in her water. Keeping up with his madcap drug dispensing, Tommy gets to the root of Cynthia's problems via narcosynthesis. Shooting her up with an unidentified drug for about 10 seconds -- "This is an awfully long injection," my wife rightly noted -- Tommy gets her to talk about the root of her problem. It seems Cynthia banged her head after falling off a horse. 

With absolutely nothing else to go on, Tommy immediately diagnoses her with having a blood clot on the brain, and arranges for surgery the following day. It took my doctors six weeks to diagnose me with renal cancer, followed by seven weeks of waiting before the surgery. Medicine obviously has gone backwards since 1947.

"Hey, I know that person!" alert. That adoptive mother I mentioned is played by a pre-game show Jayne Meadows. Her onscreen husband is cured of his fear of heart trouble when his doctor deliberately picks a fistfight with him -- a treatment no longer covered by Cigna. That MDF (Doctor of Fisticuffs) is played by the great Keye Luke, formerly Charlie Chan's #1 son. Confucius say, When co-pay not paid, broken jaw suitable substitute. 

Barrymore is disgusted by playing
third banana to a wanna-be Gable
and a crazy lady.

Dark Delusion, oddly, was the final entry in M-G-M's Kildare/Gillespie series, starring the cantankerous Lionel Barrymore. You wouldn't know it by any of the posters, since Dark Delusion was sold, quite falsely, as a romantic mystery. (The tagline -- "How Much Can A Guilty Girl Hide?" -- seems to have been created to further throw the audience off the scent.) 

It almost seems like the Gillespie scenes were an afterthought in order to pad the movie's running time to an A-length 90 minutes. Barrymore is off-screen for the bulk of the movie, which is a shame since his playing-to-the-rafters style is sorely missed. There are times, however, when he seems to be channeling his fellow character actor Edward Arnold -- but you'd recognize that, wouldn't you?

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give
a damn that I'm aping a better
actor."

And speaking of channeling, James Craig, as Dr. Coalt, struck me as doing a Clark Gable impersonation for much of the movie. That was no surprise, since he was Gable's replacement at Metro when the latter went off to war. Once Clark returned, Craig had no place else to go except, well, Dark Delusion. He, like his ilk of washed-up actors, retreated to the far more lucrative refuge of real estate. I could name a dozen actors today who should make that career change, but I'd only be wallowing in my own dark delusion.

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