'The Country Doctor' (1936) starring The Dionne Quintuplets

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Lou Lumenick

The new Fox Cinema Archives manufacture-on-demand program has my everlasting gratitude for providing the first-ever video release of Henry King's ultra-super-rare "The Country Doctor'' (1936), a one-time "event movie" (before they were called that) "starring" the Dionne Quintuplets "with Jean Hersholt'' (in that billing order). I spent years kicking myself for sleeping through an alarm and missing a middle-of-the-night screening on WCBS's "The Late Late Show'' during my high school years in the the mid-1960's. As far as I can tell, it was never shown on TV again; the last screening in these parts apparently occurred as part of a MoMA Fox retrospective around 1970. Attesting to the film's extreme scarcity -- it's never popped up on AMC or the Fox Movie Channel, much less TCM (the latter despite despite my lobbying) -- is the absence of a single user comment on the film's IMDB page, with not a single review written after 1936 to be found on the Internet. No entry in "Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide'' either.

I have no idea why "The Country Doctor'' has been out of circulation for nearly half a century; it's not based on a book, play or magazine article (the story was "suggested'' by a Chicago newspaper reporter who helped secure incubators for the quints). And it's not like a film depicting the most famous multiple birth in history -- the first time five siblings survived -- is an obscure subject, even after nearly eighty years. "The Country Doctor'' may be light on star power -- Hersholt, who made "Heidi'' with Shirley Temple that same year, was a replacement for Will Rogers, Hollywood's No. 1 box office draw, who died in a 1935 plane crash. But it still holds up as a glorious example of studio-crafted entertainment by a major (if largely forgotten) director, even if Sonya Levien's screenplay plays fast and loose with the facts. According the AFI Catalogue, the March 4, 1936 opening of "The Country Doctors'' in 326 North American theaters theaters was "one of the largest, if not the largest, day-and-date engagements in motion picture history.'' The day before, the film centering on -- you could just as easily say exploiting -- the birth of the Canadian quints premiered in Toronto and at the massive 5,940-seat Radio City Music Hall (Fox having bypassed its own only slightly smaller and less prestigious Roxy a block west on 50th Street).

Sold-out shows were fueled by rare reviews like the one by future Oscar-nominated screenwriter Frank S. Nugent ("The Quiet Man,'' "The Searchers'') in The New York Times: "An irresistably appealing blend of sentiment and comedy, the Twentieth Century-Fox picture justifies even that anonymous advertising genius who described the birth of the Dionne Babies as the greatest event since 'The Birth of a Nation.' " Graham Greene, no Hollywood fanboy during his reviewing days (which ended abruptly when Fox brought suit over his notorious review of "Wee Winnie Winkie") called it an "honest film…the theme is serious, the treatment has unusual edge.'' Even Thornton Delehanty, writing in what was known as The New York Evening Post and awarding it merely a "good'' (not "excellent'') rating on the paper's antique "Moviemeter'' had to admit that "The Country Doctor'' "could have maintained the comedy level of the scene in which an expectant father is overwhelmed by the cumulative births of five daughters it would undoubtedly have emerged as the most exhilirating picture of the year.''

That terriffic scene comes 75 minutes into a 95-minute movie mainly devoted to the travails (apparently recycled at least partly from an unproduced 1930 screenplay by Levien and Don Marquis) of the title character, a highly fictionalized version of Allan Roy Dafoe, here referred to as Dr. John Luke. Working for 35 years with little or no compensation in a lumber town in Canada's north woods, Dr. Luke is a beloved medico who battles a diphteria epidemic -- there's an unforgettable image of a woman watching through a window as her child receives last rites in a makeshift quarantine ward -- with the assistance of his loyal nurse (Dorothy Peterson, whose acting, like Hersholt's, is beyond reproach). When Dr. Luke goes to Montreal to plead for a real hospital to Montague Love's indifferent titled company bureaucrat (in a sequence singled out by Greene as "a fine satirical portrait… of brutal complacency") Dr. Luke ends up being replaced by a young company doctor. It doesn't help that Dr. Luke has been practicing without a license for 35 years, because he couldn't afford the fee.

There's a less compelling romantic subplot involving Dr. Luke's nephew (Michael Whalen), an intern who's also a pilot and a boxer, and the daughter (June Lang) of the hot-headed head of the lumber camp (Robert Barrat) who wants to be rid of both the Lukes. The elder Dr. Luke is about to depart from Moosetown by ship when Asa Wyatt begs Dr. Luke, who has already delivered six of his children, to attend to his wife, who has gone into labor two months early.

Superbly played by Swedish-Canadian character actor (and John Ford favorite) John Qualen, Asa Wyatt is a fictionalized version of Olivia Dionne. Thornton Delehanty is correct about what he called the "excruciatingly funny'' scene depicting the father reacting to the birth of the five girls -- in fact, I'd say it's actually funnier than the corresponding scene in Preston Sturges "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek'' (1944) which turns out to have been influenced by King's film. Expertly partnering Qualen in this scene is Slim Summerville -- a character actor I've never found especially funny before -- as the town constable waiting to arrest Dr. Luke for practicing medicine without a license but pressed into service helping with the multiple births. (The baby's mother is only momentarily glimpsed in a later scene).

This is followed by around 15 minute of charming footage of the "Wyatt'' Quintuplets -- who are addressed by their actual Dionne first names -- including delightfully improvised scenes with Dr. Luke and his nurse that we're told were "photographed under the personal supervision of Dr. Dafoe'' by cinematographer Daniel Clarke in Callander, Ontario, when the quints were toddlers. Dr. Luke, who has finally gotten his hospital (while his nephew has gotten the girl) is pulled away from the babies long enough to receive the Order of the British Empire for a heart-warming finale.

"The Country Doctor'' is presented in a more than acceptable transfer but no apparent restoration -- there are minimal scratches and the contrast varies a bit. The first reel or so looks darker and more grainy than the rest -- like it was taken from a later-generation dupe -- but I'm inclined to cut this one some slack because of its extreme rarity.

There are no reliable box-office numbers I can find, but "The Country Doctor'' did well enough that a sequel, "Reunion'' with the Quints was rushed into theaters just eight months later. I've not seen this equally rare film, but but their third and last feature, "Five of a Kind'' has popped up several times on the Fox Movie Channel in recent years. Reportedly Fox's Darryl Zanuck harbored hopes that the quints might rival the studio's top attraction, Shirley Temple, and planned a full-scale musical for them. Shot when they were four, "Five of a Kind'' (1938) shows four awkward moppets (pictured on the set above) singing out of tune, basically supporting a hackneyed comedy about a pair of rival reporters (Cesar Romero and Claire Trevor) trying to bring the quints to New York City for a radio show.

Hersholt (a silent veteran of "Greed'' for whom Oscar's Humanitarian Award is named) was in both these sequels (along with Qualen and Summerville). Basically the benevolent Dr. Luke was spun off into Dr. Christian, a small-town doctor who Hersholt played on CBS radio from 1937 to 1954, as well as a six-film RKO B-movie series (1939-1941). Just before his death in 1956, Hersholt reprised the role one last time in the first two episodes of a Gene Roddenberrry-scripted "Dr. Christian'' TV series starring MacDonald Carey.

"The Country Doctor'' has a scene where it's mentioned that the self-effacing Dr. Luke has turned down commercial endorsements for the Quints, but in real-life who was nowhere near as modest or shy about cashing in on his and the quints' new-found fame. He was appointed one of several guardians of the quints by the Ontario government, which turned the girls into a tourist attraction at a hospital-nursery in Callendar called "Quintland.'' An excellent 1978 CBC/NFBC documentary (unfortunately not available on video) contrasts the fictions of the three Fox films with the sad reality of the girls' lives.

The Dionnes were finally returned to their parents in 1943, but it wasn't a happy reunion: the three surviving quints said in their heartbreaking 1995 memoir they were sexually abused by their father during their teenage years. Emilie, a nun, died of an epileptic seizure at 20; Marie, of a blood clot at 35; and Yvonne, at 67, of cancer. Before Yvonne's death, in 1998, she and her two impoverished surviving sisters (who were all divorced and never remarried) received $2.8 million from the Ontario provincial government to settle a suit they brought over misappropriation of their trust fund.

"The Country Doctor'' is also important as a key work by Henry King, a skilled veteran of the silent era who was compared with Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau and Frank Borgaze but has been wrongly dismissed as a studio hack by some film historians because all his talkies, which stretched into the early 1960s, were made for Fox. Hopefully more of his inaccessible work will be offered by the Fox Cinema Archives in the future.

Another longtime Fox hand involved with "The Country Doctor'' was screenwriter-producer (and later director) Nunnally Johnson ("The Grapes of Wrath''), here credited as executive producer under Darryl F. Zanuck. Johnson has the same credit on two other titles of above-usual interest in this month's first wave of releases from the Fox Cinema Archives.

Georgia-born Johnson also took a writing credit on the delightful "Banjo on My Knee'' (also 1936), well directed by another criminally underrated helmer, John Cromwell ("Since You Went Away'' and incidentally the father of character actor James Cromwell). Barbara Stanwyck makes her on-screen singing debut as a "city girl'' from Tennessee who marries into a "shanty boat'' family on the Mississippi River. On her wedding night, her hot-tempered husband (Joel McCrea in the first of his six films with Stanwyck) flees to New Orleans after he mistakenly thinks he's killed a man (Victor Kilian, later famous as Grandpa on TV's "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman'').

Stanwyck, her father-in-law Walter Brennan and his nephew Buddy Ebsen all follow McCrea to New Orleans, where they all end up performing at the "Creole Cafe'' with Tony Martin, who tries to romance Stanwyck at the same time Katherine DeMille is plying her feminine wiles on McCrea. With this cast, plus Walter Catlett as a lecherous photographer; gorgeous black-and-white cinematography by Ernest Palmer (shown off in a nice transfer); songs by Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson; and an impressive storm climax, the seldom-seen "Banjo on My Knee'' should bring a smile to classic movie fans. A wonderful production number, "St. Louis Blues'' performed by the Hall Johnson Choir, is a lagniappe.

More in the category of a fascinating curiosity is the Johnson-produced melodrama "Nancy Steele Is Missing!" (1937). Victor McLaglen, an Oscar winner for "The Informer'' (1935), gives one of his more endearing performances as a quasi-pacifist waiter with a fierce temper who kidnaps the infant daughter of a munitions magnate (Walter Connelly) just before World War I (this occurs offscreen to honor the letter, if not quite the spirit of the Production Code). In this credulity-straining tale, he tells an old pal and his wife that he's the baby's father and puts the infant in their custody -- which stretches to two decades when he's jailed for another offense before he can even write a ransom note.

Upon his release, McLaglen arrives as the now-grown kidnapee's custodian (the wife is never mentioned) is dying, and the daughter (now played by June Lang) assumes that McLaglen is her long-lost father. McLaglen goes to drop off the delayed ransom-note at Connnelly's office -- but in one too coincidence too many, he encounters Connelly, who remembers him as a waiter and offers him a job, as well as a cottage on his Long Island estate to share with "his'' daughter. A major obstacle to an improbably happy ending is McLaglen's former cellmate in prison, entertainingly played by Peter Lorre, who overhears McLaglen talking about the kidnapping in his sleep. So Lorre concocts a scheme to pass off his "own'' orphan as Connelly's long-lost daughter to collect his millions…

"Nancy'' is briskly directed by the versatile George Marshall ("Destry Rides Again''), who was a replacement for Otto Preminger -- reassigned when Wallace Beery, who originally had McLaglen's role, balked at working with Preminger (as had Loretta Young, immediately prior, on "Love is News''). The role of a sympathetic kidnaper -- theoretically a no-no under the production code -- was originally intended for Jean Hersholt, and Connelly was originally assigned to Lorre's role as the cellmate. It's an old but serviceable transfer with the old National Telefilm Associates logo following Fox's.

Fox Cinema Archives has confirmed it's releasing two waves of releases of around 15 titles apiece every month. The next wave, out today, consists of these titles previously listed in my column, here in alphabetical order: "The Daring Young Man,'' "Deep Waters,'' "Don Juan Quilligan,'' "Earthbound,''"Elopement,'' "For Heaven's Sake,'' "Forbidden Street,''"In the Meantime, Darling,'' "Love on a Budget,'' "Mother Didn't Tell Me,'' "My Gal Sal,'' "Nob Hill,'' "The Power and the Glory,'' "The Secret of the Purple Reef'' and "Secret World.''

Incidentally, the first wave of 30 or so FCA titles from late June/early July (including a bunch I reviewed last month), discounted to $11 at Amazon over the past six days, today jumped to $14 -- still less than the $20 price at Movies Unlimited and Oldies, among other e-tailers.

Today's Warner Archive Collection releases include five previously announced Film Noir titles: "Born to Bad,'' "Las Vegas Story,'' "Southside 1-1000,'' "Walk Softly, Stranger'' and "A Woman's Secret.''
Movies Unlimited is taking pre-orders for three Jeanette McDonald vehicles on which it has Warner Archive exclusives for a limited period beginning Sept 21: W.S. Van Dyke's "Cairo'' (1942) with Robert Young and Ethel Waters; Richard Thorpe's "The Sun Comes Up''(1949) co-starring Claude Jarman Jr. and Lassie; and "Three Daring Daughters" (1948) with Jane Powell and Jose Iturbi; plus McDonald's frequent co-star Nelson Eddy in Roy Del Ruth's "The Chocolate Soldier'' (1941), a musical remake of "The Guardsman'' co-starring Rise Stevens.

"The Universal 100th Anniversary Collection,'' due Nov. 4, is apparently the largest Blu-ray collection of feature films yet, with 25 discs, and is being sold for only $50 more ($350) than the DVD version. The titles, which are all available on Blu-ray, or will be, before then: "All Quiet on the Western Front,'' "Dracula'' (1931) and its Spanish-language version; "Buck Privates,'' 'Pillow Talk,'' "Spartacus,'' "To Kill a Mockingbird,'' "The Birds,'' "American Graffiti,'' "The Sting,'' "Jaws,'' "National Lampoon's Animal House,'' "E.T. The Extra Terrestrial,'' "Scarface'' (1983), "The Breakfast Club,'' ""Back to the Future,'' "Out of Africa,'' "Field of Dreams,'' "Do the Right Thing,'' "Jurassic Park,'' "Apollo 13,'' "The Fast in the Furious,'' "The Bourne Identity,'' "Mamma Mia!'' and "Despicable Me.'' (The DVD version of the collection has 26 discs and swaps out the Spanish-language "Dracula'' for "Schindler's List,'' whose Blu-ray debut has been postponed until 2013). A DVD-only bonus discs collects all the anniversary-themed featurettes on previous releases this year, plus 14 previously available animated shorts with the likes of Oswald the Rabbit and Woody Woodpecker; and three-live action shorts featuring Shirley Temple, Babe Ruth and animator Walter Lantz. There's also a CD with 15 tracks of soundtrack music, from "The Bride of Frankenstein'' and "Touch of Evil,'' as well as many titles in the collection. Plus a 72-page book.

The Criterion Collection's bountiful November releases include a digitally restored version of the full 226-minute original theatrical cut of Michael Cimino's notorious "Heaven's Gate'' (1981) starring Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert and Christopher Walken, out Nov. 20. Features include a new interview with Cimino and a featurette on the film's historical background. On Nov. 16, Criterion will release Blu-ray upgrades for Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon'' (1950) as well as Jean-Luc Godard's out-of-print "Weekend'' (1967). Also on that date, Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life'' will be released as a set comprising "The Decameron'' (1971), "The Canterbury Tales'' (1972) and "Arabian Nights'' (1974). On Nov. 20, Criterion's DVD-only, no-frills Eclipse Line will release the four-disc "When Horror Came to Shochiku,'' consisting of four titles from the Japanese studio: "The X From Outer Space'' (1967), "Goke: Body Snatcher From Hell'' (1968), "The Living Skeleton'' (1968) and "Genocide'' (1968