Absolutely Fantastic

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Bing Crosby Productions made a number of what used to be called "thumbsuckers," movies with a philosophical context (not necessarily "message movies," although some of them were).Dr. Cook's Garden is one of those and stars Bing Crosby himself. It features Frank Converse as Jimmy Tennyson, a young doctor going back to his roots in a quaint New England town. Naturally, he visits the town doctor, Dr. Leonard Cook, played by Crosby in one of his better, certainly darker, portrayals.During his visit, Dr. Tennyson notices people dropping dead who didn't seem to have a life-threatening condition... except they often weren't nice to know or particularly decent people. There also seems to have been an unusually sharp distribution between the healthy, thriving population of the town and some sickly kids and adults who die sooner than Tennyson would have predicted.His curiosity piqued, Tennyson noses around Cook's clinic. In the dispensary, where drugs and other supplies for the clinic are kept, he notices an unusually large variety and number of poisons... and Dr. Cook knows that Tennyson noticed.Suddenly. Tennyson begins having close calls, then, in a climactic picnic (just Tennyson and Cook in a bucolic meadow), the two men have it out. Tennyson has a sandwich with a strong mustard which conceals a dose of cyanide, and when it begins to take effect, Dr. Cook reveals his secret and offers Tennyson a chance not to die if he accepts Cook's method of keeping his little town decent. Tennyson accepts, Cook gives him an antidote for the poison, and a tense relationship ensues, neither man trusting the other.Eventually Cook himself has a heart attack; Tennyson has the nitroglycerin pills that CAN save Cook... who realizes he's about to be the latest weed pruned from Dr. Cook's Garden.Crosby gives this character a calm but very dark nonchalance about the deaths he inflicts; it's a side of Bing Crosby I'd never seen back in 1971 when I first saw this film.While Bing Crosby did produce "message movies" for TV, this isn't one of them. No easy answers are in the plot, and certainly nothing that smacks of Crosby's strong Catholic belief in real life. It's a very quiet, unassuming character study, and a mystery good enough to have been in the running for an Edgar Award.I can recommend this, if you can find it. It's unusually thought- provoking for a Bing Crosby Production, worthy of that time in the history of television when at least some producers were smarting from FCC commissioner Newton Minow's judgment of television as a "wasteland," and trying to make worthwhile scripts. Watch it, you won't regret it.

It is Bing Crosby's acting swan song, and a worthy one. Except for his brilliant recovering alcoholic stage star in THE COUNTRY WIFE, and an occasional display of anger in his other films (note his speech at Emperor Franz Josef about the puppies at the end of the THE EMPEROR WALTZ), Bing is always notable for his wonderful even temper. Dr. Cook gave him his chance of pulling out the stops.Burl Ives had played the role briefly on stage, and actually got good reviews (the play seemed too slight to the critics, and to New York audiences). The story is this: Frank Converse is Dr. Jimmy Tennyson, who is returning to his small home town to work with the man whom he always admired the most, Dr. Leonard Cook (Bing). Cook is the ideal small town doctor (reminiscent of his young doctor who goes to the New England Town to assist Barry Fitzgerald in WELCOME STRANGER). He is warm and kindly, and full of common sense. He also has a green thumb, being usually in his personal garden when not with his patients. So Converse is very happy to be working with his emotional/educational mentor.But in now working closer with Cook, Dr. Tennyson begins to notice that there are some odd deaths that accrue in the town. People will ask Cook to come in for some minor cold or something like that, and will be dead in twenty four hours. Tennyson soon begins to notice that the people who die so suddenly are not really mourned. His girlfriend, Janey Raustch (Blythe Danner), points out that many of them were notoriously bad tempered neighbors, cruel to their families or to pets or other people, or drunkards who made life hellish for others, and so they aren't missed. Eventually Tennyson starts questioning Cook, and after some attempts at shrugging off Tennyson's questions Cook begins to admit that the not-to-loved departed were possibly sped on their way with Cook's assistance.Tennyson is (naturally) astounded to hear that Cook has been poisoning (with overdoses of morphine and other drugs) these patients. Cook looks upon the town as a grander version of his garden, and these bad people as the equivalent of the weeds that he removes from his real garden.The tension is the story is how Tennyson finds the growing number of dead "bad" people affecting his own conscience, and how his uncertainty is effecting his relationship with Cook, who is beginning to wonder if Tennyson is another weed to remove.SPOILER COMING UP: Cook does go after Tennyson, but suffers a heart attack (his health has been in decline for awhile). As he is dying, Tennyson runs over with Cook's medication and can give it to him, but hesitates and realizes that Cook may not deserve to live if he is a murderer. Cook sees the hesitation, and (with a quiet irony) says to Tennyson that now he sees how really easy what Cook has been doing is. And Cook dies after saying this.Crosby acting sinisterly is quite a novelty for his fans, and his final moments include chasing Converse with intent to kill him. It was quite a performance, matched by Converse and Danner (who gradually realizes what Converse has discovered). This television film has not been shown in many years, but if it is revived one day catch it. It was Bing's last moment to shine on screen.

I'm sure that this was not intended to be Bing Crosby's swan song to feature films, but that's what it turned out to be.Crosby is cast against type here. He's the kindly old country doctor in this story who lives and practices in a Norman Rockwell like small town. But Crosby is the town's terrible secret. Unbeknownst to the residents, old Doctor Cook has been euthanizing those he feels have no positive contribution to make. The old mostly, but even younger ones like a crippled child whose medical bills are breaking his parent's finances. A young colleague, Frank Converse, discovers what he's doing and the rest you have to see for yourself.It's an interesting vehicle for a man who was known as THE Catholic entertainer. And it has Bing's one and only screen death in his career. Solid acting by Bing and the cast.

One of the amazing films of the ABC Tuesday Night at the Movies, Bing Crosby starts out as a Kervorkian style doctor but crosses the line as he begins to make judgments on who in his small town must live or die based on their conduct. Chilling and foretelling.