Doctors’ Wives
In the universe of Frank Borzage’s Doctors’ Wives (Fox Film Corp; 1931), women of a somewhat elevated social status can be cunning, downright predatory. They’re always on the prowl; particularly when it comes to their doctors. Warner Baxter plays Dr. Judson Penning: a big-time, big city surgeon; an aristocrat with a prescription pad, moving shark-like from patient to patient; half his life fearlessly staring into ungodly pits of human matter plopped onto an operating table, the other half at his practice, chained to the fin de siècle ennui and simmering hypochondria of rich, overdressed society dames, with only momentary deference paid to his luckless and long suffering wife (Joan Bennett). Adapted in tear-streaks by Maurine Watkins from a novel by Henry and Sylvia Lieferant, Doctors’ Wives might have yielded, with that premise, a respectable crop of marginally low-down smut had it been made at, say, Warner Bros. with Michael Curtiz or Roy Del Ruth directing – they at least seemed to know what to do with a hopeless assignment when they caught one. Instead it received a painfully earnest recitation at the hands of a time-serving, paradigmatic auteur – an otherwise true and singular voice within the commercial epicenter of this country’s film industry – one that, rather than transcending the handicaps built into the piece, only served to expose the plodding hollowness of its five-and-dime sophistication, replete with a Happy Ending plastered on so blatantly that one might be excused a longing for the gaucheries of simple contrivance. Doctors’ Wives, despite Borzage’s oddly negligible presence behind the camera, is no more than a glorified Programmer; a film that no one ever talks about; that no one with the exception of its initial reviewers has ever really written about. And while it may perhaps be too harsh a sentence to pass on a work so ultimately slight, one cannot escape the judgment that Borzage’s film achieves that most woeful condition an entry in the American canon can fall prey to: It’s the kind of movie that only a hopeless, hero-worshipping auteurist could love … or, conceivably, like.
by Tom Sutpen