DOCTORS WIVES

DOCTORS' WIVES (1971). Director: George Schaefer.

"I don't appreciate your sleeping with your wife." 

Lorrie Dellman (Dyan Cannon) announces to a group of friends, all of whom are married to doctors as she is, that she intends to sleep with all of their husbands, and has already gotten to two of them. The next day Lorrie is caught in bed with a doctor and shot to death by her husband as everyone wonders which man (who survived the shooting and is fighting for his life in the hospital) was her lover. And this is just in the first ten minutes!

WIVES: McCargo, Williams, Cannon, Rule, Roberts

Unfortunately, anyone hoping for a serious film or just a trash wallow will be disappointed, as Doctors Wives is not a very good picture and sadly isn't quite bad enough to be much fun either. Judging from this movie, doctors, nurses and interns spend almost as much of their time having affairs as they do tending to patients. The wives in the picture consist of Amy (Janice Rule of The Swimmer) who is married to Peter (Richard Crenna), who is having an affair with his head nurse Helen (Diana Sands), whose little boy has an aneurysm. Then there's Della (Rachel Roberts of When a Stranger Calls) who is married to Dave (Gene Hackman) and confesses to him that she also had sex with lusty Lorrie. Maggie (Cara Williams) is separated from Joe (Carroll O'Connor) and drinks too much, while neglected Elaine (Marian McCargo aka Marian Moses) beds an intern-stud named Mike (Anthony Costello) even as her hubby Paul (George Gaynes of One Touch of Venus) is similarly occupied elsewhere. You need a scorecard. (If this makes you want to rush out and buy the DVD, be forewarned.) 

DOCTORS: Gaynes, Hackman, Colicos, O'Connor, Crenna

Others have noted that Doctors Wives comes off more as a racy and frank nighttime TV soap opera than a theatrical movie, and having the competent but bland, strictly small-screen Crenna in the lead doesn't help. Otherwise the cast is game with Roberts, Sands, Cannon and Williams making the best impression. And John Colicos is especially notable as the very cool, near-sociopathic wife killer who  schemes to get out of police custody when he's called to operate on Helen's son, and there are also good turns from Richard Anderson as the D.A. and Ralph Bellamy as Cannon's father. Anthony Costello also scores -- literally as well as figuratively -- as the horny and busy intern. The business with a gal named Sybil recording all of her sexual episodes is stupid, however, as is much of the movie. Several plot elements go unresolved but at least there wasn't a sequel! 

Verdict: For those anxious to see close-up shots of open heart surgery only! Some good performances but otherwise not worthwhile at all. **. 

A DOLL'S HOUSE (1959)

Julie Harris and Christopher Plummer

A DOLL'S HOUSE (1959 telefilm). Director: George Schaefer. NOTE: This production was broadcast Live.

Nora Helmer (Julie Harris) is married to a man, Torvald (Christopher Plummer), who is on the verge of great success, and their marriage seems to be happy -- on the surface. Two visitors bring upsetment to Nora's life: her old friend, Kristine (Eileen Heckart), a widow whose life turned out quite differently from Nora's; and Nils Krogstad (Hume Cronyn), who lent Nora money some time ago in order for her to secretly help her husband. Now Nils is pressuring Nora to make sure her husband doesn't fire him, or the truth will come out -- that Nora forged her late father's signature in order to get the money. An added complication is that the Helmers' good friend, Dr. Rank (Jason Robards) tells Nora that he is madly in love with her. Nora can only hope that Torvald will react with understanding if the truth about the loan and her criminal actions comes out, but she may get a very unpleasant surprise.

Eileen Heckart with Harris

This truncated TV version of one of Henrik Ibsen's greatest plays and one of the earliest masterpieces to have a feminist perspective (without hitting you over the head with it) boasts some excellent performances from the entire cast, although Robards never seems capable of playing fervid love scenes convincingly. Although she is certainly given cause, some may find Nora's seemingly abrupt character change to be equally unconvincing, along with some of her actions at the end, although that may be due to the cuts in the text made in the teleplay. In any case A Doll's House is a great play and even this abbreviated version is compelling and suspenseful.

Verdict: Worthwhile to see even this imperfect version of a masterpiece with such a great cast. ***. 

THE LAST OF MRS. LINCOLN

Robby Benson, Julie Harris, Michael Cristofer

THE LAST OF MRS. LINCOLN (1976). Producer/director: George Schaefer. Based on the play by James Prideaux. Broadway Theater Archive DVD.

"We may have been the first family, but we were far from rich."

"After your father was taken from us, people said it would get easier. But it doesn't. It gets harder."

"It is not the years that age us, but loneliness."

Recreating the Broadway show, The Last of Mrs. Lincoln was presented as a telefilm on PBS in 1976. It is wonderful that there will always be a permanent record of Julie Harris' superb performance as Mary Todd Lincoln in the days after the assassination of her husband. Then she has to deal with the death [after already losing two other children and a husband] of her 18-year-old son, Tad (Robby Benson), and what she wrongly sees as the betrayal of her oldest son Robert (Michael Cristofer) when he is forced to have her institutionalized when she has a nervous breakdown. She comes to the home of her sister (Priscilla Morrill), who after all these years still doesn't think Abraham Lincoln was worthy of her. [A great scene in a play full of many has Mary telling off an old biddy (Kate Wilkinson) who has supposedly come calling out of friendship but really just wants to crow.] Mary bonds with a young nephew (Patrick Duffy) who has more respect for her and her memories than almost everyone else around her. Benson and Cristofer are excellent in a stellar cast without a bad performance. The play takes incidents in history and makes them come alive, fleshing out these people in a way no history book could. Although it's excellent at delineating a certain time and place [from 1865 Chicago to Springfield many years later], it also reveals some universal truths. Cristofer later wrote the play The Shadow Box (which was also made into a telefilm) and now appears on the TV show Smash.

Verdict: A masterpiece. ****.