Meet Doctor Christian

In the first Dr. Christian movie, River's Edge gets a new mayor by appointment in Paul Harvey. He's a businessman and has a business man's perspective. So he thinks about ways to increase the economic activity of the town. He certainly doesn't think they need a hospital, and clashes with Jean Hersholt about his constant deficits as health commissioner and his idiosyncratic spending methods. Amidst other subplots, it reaches a crisis when he fires Hersholt and proposes to get a new health commissioner.

The Doctor Christian character and the small town he ministers to first appeared on The Vaseline Program on the CBS network in 1937. By the time it ended its run in 1954, it was regularly accepting scripts from the audience; Earl Hammer Jr. And Rod Serling were contenders for scripts early in their careers. Hersholt carried the role into TV a couple of years later. This, the first of the half dozen movies, sets the tone for the series, with practiced performers including Enid Bennett and Maude Eburne, juveniles like Marcia Mae Jones and Jackie Moran, and Hersholt giving a warm performance as te quiet old man who is far more capable than he appears.