Dr. Kildare's Victory

Dr. Kildare's Victory marked the last of the films Lew Ayres did as the idealistic young doctor James Kildare, handpicked protégé of Lionel Barrymore as Dr. Gillespie. The series was so popular though that MGM had Barrymore continue in the Gillespie role in several more films with new young assistants in his diagnostic office.

This time Ayres gets himself involved in a hospital turf war as another young doctor and the nurse he was with had the temerity to pick up and treat an injured victim outside the territory of Blair General Hospital. Emerson Hospital whose territory it was just doesn't like other hospitals poaching patients from their turf. So the lawyers get into the act and Dr. Robert Sterling and nurse Jean Rogers get the ax.

That doesn't sit well with Ayres who did the surgery on the victim and saved her life. The victim was débutante Ann Ayars who is in a Paris Hilton type role. Like Paris, Ann has a great knack for working the media which comes in handy later on.

Ayres and Ayars also may be getting something going. As fans of the series know, Dr. Kildare lost his true love nurse Mary Lamont a day before their wedding. They were a great screen team and perfectly matched in this series as Laraine Day who played Lamont shared Ayres's personal and professional vision. That would be hard to recapture.

The Kildare series were B pictures from MGM although from the look of them they would be A products in most other studios. Dr. Kildare's Victory took them out on a relatively high note.

This played on TCM earlier this week, and since I had never seen this one, was looking forward to it. I love the DK series, and this one (I think) follows DK's wedding day. I found this one overlong and a bit too fragmented. I miss Nat Pendleton's goofy role, and the Frank Orth restaurant character is very briefly seen. "Cookie" doesn't seem like the kind of girl DK would go for, but she at least gets him interested in women again(ha). Marie Blake (Later 'Grandmama on the Addams family), also known as Blossom Rock and Jeanette McDonald's sister, is in unusual fine form, but her character comes across as annoying instead of funny this time.

Still affected by the events of the last movie, Dr. Kildare (Lew Ayres) tries to move on with his career, if not his life. He spends most of this movie trying to help out a young intern (Robert Sterling) and his nurse girlfriend (Jean Rogers) who violate hospital policy to save lives. Meanwhile, Kildare attracts the romantic interest of flirty socialite Cookie Charles (Ann Ayars) after he removes a shard of glass from her heart.

The ninth and final Dr. Kildare movie from MGM. The reason for Lew Ayres' departure, as probably everyone reading this knows, was that pacifist Ayres was a conscientious objector during WW2. This didn't sit well with the public so the studio removed him from the series. Ayres did later serve as a medic and chaplain's assistant under combat conditions in the Pacific. He would return to acting after the war and was nominated for an Oscar for Johnny Belinda. The series would continue on with Lionel Barrymore's Dr. Gillespie as the star. Most of those movies wouldn't be quite up to the standard of the Kildare ones but they were, for the most part, very enjoyable medical dramas.

All of the returning players are good. Nurse Parker (Nell Craig) gets a couple of really funny moments. She's one of the more under-appreciated talents in the fine cast this series had. The new faces are a mixed bag. There was undoubtedly some hope by MGM that Sterling might be able to take over for Kildare at some point but he's just so bland and forgettable that was never going to work. There would be more like him in the Gillespie series. Jean Rogers does much better but this is also her only entry in the series. She's very beautiful. Barry Nelson overacts as a drunk who's proud of being from Philadelphia. Ann Ayars is no Laraine Day and her character is annoying and that's all I'll say about that. It's not the best of the series or even in the top five but it is entertaining.

An ambulance picks up a debutante lying on the sidewalk in front of a nightclub with a shard of glass in her heart. Unfortunately... the territory the nightclub is in is outside the jurisdiction of Blair General Hospital, and lawsuits soon arrive...

As with the other films in the Kildare series, this excellent entry has several sub-plots that initially seem unconnected, but still seem to play off each other through out the course of the film.

Watch early in the film for the cigarette rolling contest between Dr. gillespie (Lionel Barrymore), and his always adversarial.. but loving watchdog... head nurse.

Overall, this, as with all films in in the series, are well done, and make enjoyable viewing for all.

...for her tiresome portrayal of débutante Cynthia 'Cookie' Charles, a patient who has a beer sign fall on her and a piece of the sign embedded in her heart. Once Cookie begins recovering she has the hots for the recent victim of tragedy, Dr. James Kildare, the surgeon who saved her life. However, her moves are so obvious she might as well be sending up flares. It's too bad she didn't buy some popcorn and see the earlier Kildare movies or she would know that slow, steady, and sweet are how you win the heart of James Kildare, not with overt come-ons.

The rest of the film is great. The series has mercifully removed Red Skelton from the role of orderly - Red's a great comic, but this just was not his style. Unfortunately, Nat Pendleton is still absent in the same role. On the light side there's a DT patient that runs through the hospital looking for his pink elephants, some great cigarette rolling by head nurse Molly Byrd, and a comic bit involving Doctor Carew who is mistaken for - both a maniac and a ghost??? The serious side involves an agreement between Blair and another hospital involving a dividing line between their territories as to where emergency cases go. A young couple in love - an intern and a nurse- have their jobs become casualties of the technicalities of this agreement. Dr. Kildare decides to help them out, first because their cause is just, and second because the two of them probably remind him of himself and Mary Lamont in happier times.

Highly recommended as a good entry in the series and unfortunately, the last with Lew Ayres as the suave Dr. K.