Fri 24 Jun 2011
UNDERCOVER DOCTOR. Paramount Pictures, 1939. Lloyd Nolan, Janice Logan, J. Carrol Naish, Heather Angel, Broderick Crawford, John Eldredge, Raymond Hatton, Paul Fix, Richard Denning. One of four short films made in 1939-40 based on the book Persons in Hiding), by J. Edgar Hoover. Director: Louis King.
Lloyd Nolan gets top billing, although at least fifteen minutes have gone by before he shows up on the screen. (It pays to have a good agent.)
It’s J. Carroll Naish as the titular doctor instead who gets most of the screen time, he along with semi-brutish Broderick Crawford, whom I’ve never seen so young, as Public Enemy #1, Eddie Krator, a role he was (as they say) born to play.
You might get the idea from the title that Dr. Bartley Morgan (Naish) is working undercover for the FBI, for whom Nolan is of their top agents, but if so, you would be wrong. The title of this film really ought to be Underworld Doctor, since Morgan, in a moment of weakness (and the love of money) works for Krator and not against him.
He’s a high society kind of guy, or so are his aspirations. Loving him in vain is his nurse and devoted assistant (and keeper, if truth be known), played by Janice Logan, whom you may also have seen in Dr. Cyclops (1940) as Dr. Mary Robinson. If you missed that one, you probably missed her career, as she was in only six feature films in all. At times and at the right angles, she reminded me of a slightly prettier Veda Ann Borg.
In any case, if Dr. Morgan is content to ignore the woman who works for him, aiming for a society marriage instead, it is cool Lloyd Nolan who was never loath to pass up a chance like this. Dumping Krator when his usefulness is up, Morgan suddenly finds himself short of funds and has to do one more job for his former mentor. Which is when the bottom falls out of his life, which I hope does not reveal anything I should not. (I do not believe so.)
The movie’s a solid piece of work all the way through, even though you will see all of the twists coming a mile away. You will also see lots of lots of familiar faces. I’ve listed some of them that I could put a name to, but there are many others that I couldn’t, and so I didn’t.
July 17th, 2011 at 11:45 am
Sorry for a late comment, but what’s with J. Edgar Hoover having written the original story for this? I know he did at least one book (PERSONS IN HIDING) that was filmed twice, but this sounds more melodramatic.
July 17th, 2011 at 12:26 pm
Juri
That’s my fault. Hoover wrote the book the film was based on, not the story itself. I’ve rewritten the credits to make this clearer.
The book was PERSONS IN HIDING as you say. The four films I refer to that were based on it were:
# Queen of the Mob (1940) (book “Persons in Hiding”)
# Parole Fixer (1940) (book “Persons in Hiding”)
# Undercover Doctor (1939) (story)
# Persons in Hiding (1939) (book “Persons in Hiding”)
This was taken from IMBD, but the American Film Institute page for UNDERCOVER DOCTOR mentions only the book, not that Hoover had anything to do with the story.
The two main screenwriters were Horace McCoy & William R. Lipman, with McCoy of course of special note.
As for the movie being melodramatic and having anything much to do with book, you know how that goes. Yes on the former, and probably not on the latter.
July 18th, 2011 at 2:46 am
Oh, thanks for this, Steve.
There seem to be other films based on Hoover’s writings, but they are more on the non-fiction or documentary bent:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045309/
and
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0269666/
This great article on Crane Wilbur asserts, though, that WALK EAST ON BEACON! is strictly fictional.
But is PERSONS IN HIDING fictional? The films based on it seem to differ greatly from each other.
July 18th, 2011 at 10:28 am
Definitely non-fiction, although the details were probably embellished. I believe the book consisted of separate case files, one per chapter, which is how they managed to come up with so many movies from it. Hoover probably didn’t write it himself. According to Wikipedia a man named Courtney Ryley Cooper did the actual writing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtney_Ryley_Cooper