1970's "Dr. Cook's Garden" was an ABC-TV Movie of the Week (broadcast Jan. 19, 1971), boasting the unexpected casting of Hollywood icon Bing Crosby in the challenging title role of Dr. Leonard Cook, who takes the same kind of pride in his country town as in his personal garden. As the only physician in the Vermont community of Greenfield, the nearest hospital 30 miles away, he has no qualms about making house calls even in the middle of the night, welcoming home one of his former patients, Jimmy Tennyson (Frank Converse), who once idolized him as a child, now a capable, full fledged doctor in his own right. What Tennyson isn't expecting is Cook's rejection of him as a replacement, tensions rising over the huge amount of poison in his locked cabinet, and the curious terminology between his flowers and his patients (the letter 'R' stands for 'Removal'). The philosophical question of how to save lives by taking them is the centerpiece of this Ira Levin story, first produced as a flop Broadway play in 1967 (closing after only 8 performances), with Burl Ives as the old doctor, Keir Dullea his younger counterpart, James Stewart up for the Ives role in a proposed feature film. What makes it work is the offbeat presence of Crosby, as an actor best remembered as the benevolent priest Father O'Malley in "Going My Way" and "The Bells of St. Mary's," whose facade of compassion comes off as believably genuine, until the threat of exposure brings out his more dangerous, self centered side. By contrast, Frank Converse's one note performance fails to truly resonate as a figure for audience identification, inevitably the loser in his confrontations opposite the redoubtable Bing (the lovely Blythe Danner comes off better in a subordinate role as Cook's dedicated nurse).
