EMERGENCY HOSPITAL

John Archer and Margaret Lindsay

EMERGENCY HOSPITAL (1956). Director: Lee Sholem.

Dr. Janet Carey (Margaret Lindsay of Club Havana) is a very busy doctor at a state-run hospital during the night shift. Ben Caldwell (Byron Palmer of Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki) is a race car driver and playboy who wants Janet to give it all up and marry him, while Dr. Herb Ellis (John Archer) seems to be carrying a torch for Janet as well. Sgt. Paul Arnold (Walter Reed) is the police liaison with the hospital and he is on hand when his son, Jimmy (James Noah), is brought in after an accident and nearly winds up in a nasty incident between father and son. There are other assorted crises and patients during one long night.

James Noah and Walter Reed

Emergency Hospital looks like an especially gritty TV production, and in truth it's the kind of stuff that later wound up in many episodes of assorted medical shows -- life, death, accidents, diseases, assorted mini-dramas with some life lessons passed out by the staff. Lindsay is puffy-looking but gives a good performance, and Reed has some very good moments in the sequences with his son. Archer makes a positive impression as a decent guy who may just have to take a back seat to the flashier Caldwell, who is well-played by Palmer. Rita Johnson [Forty Little Mothers] scores as head nurse Norma Mullen.

The large cast also includes Rhodes Reason and William Boyett as traffic cops; Vera Francis as a lovely African-American nurse also named Vera; and Mary Carver, Maxine Gates, and Jan Englund as semi-hysterical patients.

Verdict: Too bad Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare don't put in an appearance. **3/4. 

DEVIL GODDESS

Billy Griffith

DEVIL  GODDESS (1955). Director: Spencer Gordon Bennett.

In the last of the "Jungle Jim" movies -- or the last non-JJ movie, since star Johnny Weissmuller plays himself and not Jungle Jim, more or less -- our hero encounters Nora (Angela Stevens) who is accompanying her father, Professor Carl Blakely (Selmer Jackson) on a search for the missing Professor Dixon (Billy Griffith). Turns out Dixon has gone a little crazy and become the strange Fire God of the Mountain, but he is actually on a mission to get a tribe to give up the practice of human sacrifice. Sarabina (Vera Francis) is to be one of the sacrifices, and her lover Teinusi (Abel Fernandez) gets Johnny to help him save the gal. The natives are especially restless and the mountain is about to blow its top. Naturally there are bad white guys looking for treasure. One sequence is lifted straight from Savage Mutiny, the Jungle Jim feature which also starred Angela Stevens. The exciting fight between Weissmuller and a gorilla on a rope bridge was taken from Pygmy Island. The best scene in this has chimp Kimba and his simian buddies getting drunk! After this Weissmuller did Jungle Jim, the TV series, which lasted one season and twenty-six episodes. There is no actual "Devil Goddess" in the picture.

Verdict: Barely acceptable jungle adventure with familiar elements. **.