Alfred Hitchcock’s Hollywood career started with a bang: his first two films on this side of the Atlantic — “Rebecca” and “Foreign Correspondent” — were both nominated for Oscar’s Best Picture in a field of 10, and “Rebecca” won (though Hitchcock lost Best Director to John Ford for “The Grapes of Wrath.”)
Despite some obvious Hitchcock touches, the gothic romance “Rebecca” is less typical of the director’s ouevre than that of his then-employer, uber-producer David O. Selznick, who scored back-to-back Best Picture Oscars with “Gone With the Wind” and “Rebecca” before spending the remaining quarter-century of his life trying to top his signal achievements.
Made on loan to another independent producer who distributed through United Artists, Walter Wanger, “Foreign Correspondent” (out Tuesday in a sparking new Blu-ray/DVD transfer from the Criterion Collection) gave Hitchcock a chance to show how he could improve comic thrillers like those he had made in his native Britain (“The 39 Steps” and “The Lady Vanishes”) on a Hollywood-sized budget. The result is one of Hitchcock’s most entertaining films and one that very much looks forward to his supreme achievement in this genre, “North by Northwest,” 19 years later.
The earlier film is a sprint through England and Holland on the brink of World War II, centering on the title character, a former police reporter grandly renamed Huntley Haverstock (Joel McCrea), sent by his publisher (Harry Davenport) to get an interview with a key Dutch diplomat (Albert Basserman, who snagged an Oscar nomination) who has eluded the paper’s regular correspondent (humorist Robert Benchley, one of six writers who contributed to the script) in London.
This quest brings McCrea into contact with a supposed peace advocate (Herbert Marshall), the man’s idealistic daughter (Laraine Day) and his sinister associate (Eduardo Ciannelli), as well as a bodyguard (Edmund Gwenn) with ulterior motives.
It’s all a pretty flawless blend of comedy and thrills that includes some of Hitchcock’s most memorable set pieces: an assassination in the rain; a mysterious windmill; and, for a vow climax, a plane shot down at sea by what’s pretty plainly meant to a Germans ship.
Selznick wouldn’t let Hitchcock use his “Rebecca” leading lady, Joan Fontaine, but Hitch was granted the services of William Cameron Menzies, the production designer of “Gone with the Wind,” as well as that film’s special effects crew.
Producer Wanger was so generous with the budget — the sets are enormous — that the film ended up losing money on its initial release. Gary Cooper always regretting turning down “Foreign Correspondent” (to do DeMille’s cheesy “Northwest Mounted Police”), but McCrea does a smashing job, both with the derring-do and romantically defrosting Day, who always seemed more reserved than most of her contemporaries.
Criterion’s excellent supplements include an analysis of the film’s still-impressive visual effects by contemporary expert Craig Barron. There is also writer Mark Harris eloquently holding forth on how “Foreign Correspondent” was one of several major Hollywood productions that openly urged U.S. intervention in the war before Pearl Harbor (including a rousing closing speech writen by Ben Hecht that was shot after the end of principal photography).
Laraine Day was loaned out for “Foreign Correspondent” from MGM, where she was under contract and a regular in a popular series of programmers centering on the idealistic young Manhattan hospital intern (later resident) Dr. James Kildare, who had been created in a novel by Frederick Faust, who under the pen name Max Brand also wrote the much-filmed “Destry Rides Again.”
Joel McCrea, as it happens, was the first actor to play Kildare, in a Paramount A picture with his frequent co-star (and real-life friend) Barbara Stanwyck (not playing a nurse), “Internes Can’t Take Money” (1937) that has a grittiness unlike the subsequent MGM series.
The nine-film series, which has just been released in a remastered set by the Warner Archive Collection, is one of MGM’s best — built around new contractee Lew Ayres, a fine actor whose waning career (which stretched back to the lead in the Oscar-winning “All Quiet and the Western Front”) had just been revived by his supporting role in “Holiday,” and one of the studio’s many scene-stealing character actors, Lionel Barrymore, as Kildare’s newly-created mentor Dr. Leonard Gillespie.
Fans of TV’s “House” will recognize this crotchety iteration of Dr. G, an expert diagnotician, as one of the prototypes for the decades-later, disabled medical detective played by Hugh Laurie — though Barrymore was confined to a wheelchair by severe arthritis in real life as well as for all his roles (except for one) from 1938 on.
MGM starlet Lynne Carver served as Kildare’s love interest (the girl next door from his home in Connecticut) in “Young Dr. Kildare,” but she was succeeded in “Calling Dr. Kildare” (1939), by Day as Mary Lamont, a nurse who worked with Drs. K and G at Blair General Hospital, which at least one episode places on E. 93rd Street (the exterior shots show the lower floors of the MGM administration building, enhanced with a matte painting to turn it into a high rise).
Like Ayres, Day was kept busy as a utility player in other MGM films (she was Boy’s ill-fated mom in “Tarzan Finds a Son!”) as well as loan-outs. She makes not more than a token appearance in “The Secret of Dr. Kildare (1940), her second Kildare film, where the good doctor is temporarily tempted by a patient suffering from hysterial blindness (played by Helen Gilbert, recruited from the MGM orchestra, and Lionel Atwill has a rare sympathetic role as her wealthy father in an episode that has fallen into the public domain. I taped an introduction for a Roan Group release a decade ago).
MGM decided to write Day out of the series by killing Nurse Mary off in “Dr. Kildare’s Wedding Day” (1941) — I’m not giving away anything that isn’t all but announced in the film’s trailer, where the bad news is delivered by none other than Red Skeleton, who had replaced Nat Pendleton as the series’ ambulance-driver comic relief. (The engraved invitation to the wedding is in the name of Nurse Mary’s brother, played in “Dr. Kildare’s Crisis” by Robert Young, but MIA from this movie).
All of the series’ numerous other regulars are on hand for this episode — hospital administrator Walter Kingsford, Dr. K’s parents Samuel S. Hinds and Emma Dunn, nurses Alma Kruger and Nell Craig, Dr. K. manservant George Reed and switchboard operator Marie Blake. There are two major subplots: Dr. Gillespie’s refusal to go to a sanitarium to be treated for his cancer (a continuing storyline for a disease rarely mentioned in films of the era) and the doctors’s attempts to diagnose a hearing affliction suffered by a famous composer (former MGM star Nils Asther, back after a seven-year absence). The film even manages to work in a symphonic piece actually written by Barrymore, who performs part of it the piano.
After Nurse Mary’s death, MGM successfully rebooted the series — at least they thought so at the time — with “Dr. Kildare’s Victory” (1942) in which he despondent doctor was given a new love interest played by… forgotten MGM starlet Ann Ayars, surely an odd choice to team with Lew Ayres. Regular series director Harold S. Bucquet was replaced by MGM troubleshooter W.S. Van Dyke (who performed similar duties on the Andy Hardy series).
MGM covered its bets by re-teaming Ayres and Day in a non-series thriller, the excellent “Fingers at the Window” (1942), but this as it turned out was Ayres’ MGM swan song, at least on the big screen. His contract was terminated after he declared himself a conscientious objector, and served with distinction as a medic in World War II — while the series continued with Barrymore as the lead, auditioning a long string of assistants (of whom Van Johnson was the most popular).
After the war, MGM rehired Ayres and re-teamed him for Barrymore for a Dr. Kildare radio series that ran for a couple of seasons (minus Day, who had moved over to RKO but never achieved top stardom despite stints opposite Cary Grant and John Wayne).
Warner Archive releases rarely contain extras, but this set includes a fascinating one. An unsold “Dr. Kildare” series pilot starring Ayres as the now middle-aged medico, shot in 1960, just after MGM had unsucessfully attempted to revive the “Andy Hardy” series with a theatrical feature starring Mickey Rooney. (There was also an unsold TV pilot, without Rooney).
With a portrait of Dr. Gillespie (Barrymore died in 1953) looking down, Ayres’ Kildare schemes to keep his most talented graduating intern from taking a job with a practice in Cincinnati.
While it’s interesting to see Ayres playing his signature role later in life, it’s easy to see why this low-key pilot didn’t sell. The actor playing his new assistant doesn’t have a fraction of the charisma posssed by the the actor who ends up in Cleveland, played by….25-year-old Robert Redford. Also, it’s a half-hour pilot at a time when one-hour dramatic series were beginning to catch on.
Indeed, a revamped “Dr. Kildare” was a smash hit when it premiered on NBC in September 1961, starring Richard Chamberlain in the title role and a more avuncular than crotchety Raymond Massey as Dr. G. It ran for five seasons (Redford was a guest star in season two, which was released concurrently by WAC).
The durable characters were revived yet again for “Young Dr. Kildare,” which ran for a single season in first-run syndication beginning in 1972. This forgotten iteration starred Mark Jenkins and Gary Merrill.