Alias the Doctor (1932) - film review

Martha Brenner is filled with pride when her son Stefan and adopted son Karl leave their country home and go off to Munich to study medicine.    But whilst Karl is a brilliant student who looks set to qualify with honours, his foster brother is a wastrel who spends more time drinking than studying.  One evening, Stefan performs surgery on a girlfriend he injured whilst under the influence of alcohol.  When the girl dies from the botched operation, Karl steps in and takes the blame.  He spends three years in jail whilst his foster brother graduates and begins a medical practice in his home village.   On his return home, Karl learns that his brother has died through his heavy drinking.   When a man is grievously injured in a car accident, Karl has no choice but to operate.  The operation is a success and Karl is persuaded to pursue a career as a surgeon, under his dead brother’s name. Karl knows that if his true identity were ever to be revealed, he will be arrested and sent back to prison...

In the decades before he helmed some of the all-time classics of Hollywood (including The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Casablanca (1942)), Michael Curtiz directed dozens of pretty nondescript films, many of which have, rightly, been swallowed up by the mists of time.   Alias the Doctor is one of Curtiz’s early talkies which stands out, despite its unpromising subject matter (a contrived melodrama of the worst kind), and deserves to preserved as a good example of a great director developing his technique.

In his silent and early sound films, Michel Curtiz was greatly influenced by German expressionism.  The use of slanted camera angles, enlarged shadows, silhouettes and so forth, so redolent of 1920s German cinema, pervades much of the work of Curtiz and fellow European émigrés who arrived in Hollywood in the early 1930s.  These stylistic touches, which suggest the ghost of Fascism, would begin to permeate American cinema in the 1930s, reaching their full expression as film noir in the 1940s and ’50s.

Alias the Doctor would be easy to overlook were it not for the imaginative way in which the film is shot and edited.  Aided by art director Anton Grot and cinematographer Barney McGill, Curtiz takes a rather dull and implausible melodrama and gives it psychological depth and emotional realism through its visual presentation.  The dialogue and performances contribute very little.  What makes the film so compelling, and the story so poignant is the way in which camera and the lighting tell the story. 

Expressionism originally developed in German art as a reaction against realism, to convey feeling and subjective experience rather than portray a cold objective reality.  This film shows how powerful this same technique can be when applied to the art of cinema.  Indeed, it can be argued that no artistic medium is better suited to the expressionistic form; cinema is the most dream-like of all the arts, and expressionism is the language of dreams.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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