Zeus

Men In White (1934)

• Director
  • Richard Boleslawski
• Writers
  • Waldemar Young
  • Sidney Kingsley
• Stars
  • Clark Gable
  • Myrna Loy
  • Jean Hersholt

  In an unusual move, MGM released its film version of Sidney Kingsley's Pulitzer-Prize winning play Men in White while the play was still running on Broadway. Clark Gable is cast as Dr. George Ferguson, a dynamic young intern whose brilliant future seems assured. In addition to planning to study in Vienna, then to serve as the assistant to his mentor Dr. Hochberg (Jean Hersholt), Ferguson is slated for a socially prestigious marriage to wealthy Laura Hudson (Myrna Loy). But when Laura begins expressing displeasure over Ferguson's dedication to his work, he enters into a brief affair with student nurse Barbara Dennin (Elizabeth Allan). Upon finding that she's pregnant, Barbara desperately undergoes an illegal abortion (a plot point merely alluded to in the screenplay). The botched operation results in Barbara being rushed into emergency surgery, where her life is in Ferguson's hands. In a third-act climax that would not have seemed out of place on TV's Chicago Hope, Laura finds herself a witness to the operation -- and to Barbara's deathbed "absolution" of Dr. Ferguson's sins. Critics were kind to Men in White, but some felt that the Kingsley original had been unnecessarily reshaped into a Clark Gable vehicle.