Brilliant and touching

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Stanley Kramer's first directorial effort. Based on a best selling book. Major movie stars all around. Sadly a rather ho-hum picture.Mitchum is just too ... too... "Mitchum" for this one. He is stoic to the point of immobility. He is also too old to be a medical school student. It's hard to actually care about his financial and romantic problems because he is so self absorbed and self contained to be believed. Sinatra is better at bringing his character to life BUT he does seem like a replay of Eternity's Magio only without Fatso beating him up. One outstanding scene does involve Mitchum really getting on his case.Lee Marvin is in the cast as another medical student. Not a big part, but he IS there. Lon Chaney,Jr is painfully effective as the alcoholic father ( he also has a small role in Kramer's "The Defiant Ones" a couple of years later) The picture perks up once the doctors get into medical practice for themselves. Charles Bickford and Gloria Grahame playing their usual roles but playing them well. Locationwise, it's the biggest "small town" I have ever seen in a film. It's a city, what were they thinking ? The music swells. Olivia deHaviland chews the scenery in her sweet and then angry mode.Nothing new, nothing really special. Medical melodrama of its time.

I try not to read the other comments about a film until I formulate my own; but, this time I read the many other comments. The reason is: I found some astonishing problems with "Not as a Stranger" and wanted to see if the many comments noticed. They did.Maybe they could have called it "Cast by a Stranger"? Anyway, I tried to figure… maybe Robert Mitchum was a little old for med-school because he got a late start? The scene with Lon Chaney indicated he might have been a troubled start in life. That doesn't mean his performance isn't good - but, his is the central role, so his performance had to be great.Olivia de Havilland took getting used to, but I think she may actually be the right age for the film. But, how she achieved spinsterhood as a Swedish blonde nurse with that face and figure is a mystery never explained. Where had she been hiding for 20 years? Frank Sinatra was too old, yes. I though he looked even older that the 40-years mentioned in a couple of posts. Not only older, but unhealthy for this part of a med-school student (bunking with Robert Mitchum). Maybe the Sinatra character could have worked as a non-medical friend.Still, I would say the stars are interesting. Charles Bickford was excellent, and there are a lot of familiar faces who did an adequate job. You get the part and show up prepared (and, hopefully sober). Producers and casting directors have a lot to do with these errors - you can't always tell you're in a turkey role. ****** Not as a Stranger (1955) Stanley Kramer ~ Robert Mitchum, Olivia de Havilland, Frank Sinatra

Enjoyed this great story and all the actors who gave outstanding performances, especially Olivia De Havilland, (Kristina Hedvigson) who played the wife to Robert Mitchum,(Lucas Marsh). Kristina came from a wealthy family and fell in love with Lucas Marsh who was going to medical school and gave him financial support in his striving to become a successful surgeon. There are great scenes in the operating room and it was done so professionally that it kept you on pins and needles throughout the entire picture. Gloria Graham, (Harriet Lang) plays the role of a very sexy rich woman who teases and pleases Lucas Marsh and makes him feel very guilty for cheating on his wife. Frank Sinatra, (Alfred Boone) gives a great supporting role as a real close friend to Lucas and they both went through medical school together and each went their separate ways as doctors. There is plenty of drama and if you have not seen this Great Classic 1955 film, you will definitely want to view many great veteran actors at the top of their careers.

With a cast including Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, Broderick Crawford, Lee Marvin and Gloria Grahame, you'd expect hard-boiled crime drama. If so, you might want your money back after seeing NOT AS A STRANGER. One Hollywood wag remarked of the Mitchum-Sinatra-Crawford-Marvin lineup, "That's not a cast, that's a brewery!" and the actors lived up to their rowdy reputations, turning the shooting into "ten weeks of hell" for director Stanley Kramer. Mitchum described Crawford swallowing Sinatra's hairpiece with a vodka chaser (Of course, you never know when Mitchum is putting you on. But I like to believe he did call up Sinatra in Palm Springs to say, "Guess what? The Crawdad just drank your wig.") Sinatra took to calling Mitchum "mother" after he nursed Ol' Blue Eyes through a hangover. It's too bad Kramer didn't film these on-set antics; the footage would have been more entertaining than the plodding and earnest medical melodrama he did produce.The casting is spectacularly misguided; for a start, everyone is almost twenty years too old. The film opens with the 40-ish Mitchum, Sinatra and Marvin as medical students observing a dissection, and right away credibility is strained. (If I walked into a doctor's office and saw Lee Marvin in a white coat, I would run.) And whose idea was it to cast the famously jaded, take-it-or-leave-it Mitchum as the rigid, idealistic, driven hero? Only top-billed Olivia de Havilland seems to belong in this type of movie, and she suffers from a platinum dye job and a mediocre Garbo accent. I waited more than an hour for Gloria Grahame to show up, and then she was wasted on a throwaway subplot that's over almost before it begins.No cast could have made the movie much good. It's overlong, and the script is both obvious and underwritten; a few minutes into every scene I could predict what was going to happen by the end, and I foresaw the final plot twist about halfway through the film. The first half follows Lucas Marsh (Robert Mitchum) through medical school. For reasons never entirely clear he is obsessed with becoming a doctor, though his father (who drank up all the money his mother left to pay his tuition) tells him, "I don't think you'll make it. It's not enough to have a brain, you have to have a heart." Thus in the third scene we get the message of the movie, and have a pretty good idea of everything that will follow. Desperate for money to stay in school, Luke woos and marries Kristina (Olivia de Havilland), a frumpy Swedish nurse who—for reasons never entirely clear—is madly in love with him. (We know because she keeps telling him, "I love you SO MUCH!") It's made abundantly clear that Luke is brilliant and noble-minded—he despises the other students who just want to make a lot of money—but arrogant and intolerant of human frailty. In his first practice, assisting a kindly and intelligent small-town doctor (Charles Bickford) he does a wonderful job, but his marriage disintegrates as he falls for a seductive wealthy widow and his wife can't bring herself to tell him she's pregnant. You just know that sooner or later he's going to falter at the operating table and be shattered by the realization that He Too is Only Human.To this oppressive script, add heavy-handed direction that hammers each point home with obvious symbolism and simplistic montages (and a few--but not enough--moments of unintentional hilarity like the whinnying stallion underscoring the first big Mitchum-Grahame clinch), and the most relentlessly overwrought music I've ever heard. No one except Sinatra, playing the only light-hearted role, manages to crawl out from under the lead blanket of this movie. My admiration for Robert Mitchum knows no bounds, and I wouldn't say he's bad here, but he's certainly been better. It's not that he's incapable of playing characters who care deeply or zealously pursue a goal (See HEAVEN KNOWS, MR. ALLISON or NIGHT OF THE HUNTER.) The problem is that Lucas Marsh is humorless, uptight and self-righteous, devoid of that perceptive, ironic, compassionate distance that's essential to Mitchum. Marsh is hot tempered, intolerant of others and blind to his own flaws—in other words, it's a Kirk Douglas part. Kirk would have been perfect, but Mitchum never really connects with the character. Maybe it just didn't seem worthwhile: Mitchum never gave more to a movie than it deserved. He does have some nice moments: the encounter with his pathetic father gives some explanation for why he's so disgusted by weakness; he plays well with Sinatra, strikes some sparks with Gloria Grahame, and excellently delineates Luke's feelings for his wife, a mix of boredom, admiration and guilt. He's pretty convincing in the doctoring scenes (there are way too many of these, at least for someone like me who gets woozy at the sight of a hypodermic needle.) But he seems a little bored most of the time, not that I blame him. Maybe I should have taken my cue from the actors and had a few drinks on hand.