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50:169 Doctors in Film
Film Notes
The Interns
The Interns opened in August of 1962. Brosely Crowther wrote a review for the New York Times that none too gently pointed out the film depicted "a bunch of schoolboys" rather than what he hoped would be the "medical practitioners of tomorrow." Perhaps the "nervousness and naivete" is overdone, but the film is nevertheless revealing of medical life in the early 1960s, whatever the flaws of the plot. Most of the interns still live in a dormatory, as was common before the mid-1970s, and were expected to be unmarried. They faced immersion in a new medical heirarchy, feelings for their patients, a request for a physician-assisted suicide, drug use, jealousies and competition. The movie script was based on a best selling novel by Robert Friede, and inspired both a sequel (The New Interns) and a television series.
Questions for discussion:
- How are doctor-patient relationships depicted in the film?
- How are the interns socialized into the medical community?
- What situations are depicted as ethically problematic in the film? are they resolved?
- What situations are depicted as appropriate/tolerated that today would seem ethically problematic?
- How is the woman intern defined? treated?
| Film synopsis and commentary: Literature, Medicine and the Arts database |
| Frankenstein | M*A*S*H |
| Arrowsmith | The Hospital |
| Young Dr. Kildare | |
| No Way Out | Gross Anatomy |
| Magnificent Obsession | The Doctor |
| The Interns | The Patriot |