Nick-Davis.com: Captain Newman, M.D.

Captain Newman, M.D.
First screened and reviewed in July 2021

Director: David Miller. Cast: Gregory Peck, Angie Dickinson, Tony Curtis, Bobby Darin, Eddie Albert, James Gregory, Bethel Leslie, Robert Duvall, Jane Withers, Dick Sargent, Larry Storch, Robert F. Simon, Syl Lamont, Paul Carr. Screenplay: Richard L. Breen, Phoebe Ephron, and Henry Ephron (based on the novel by Leo Rosten).

In Brief: Minor. Tonally weird. When a movie's best remembered for its performances, you really want those to hold up.

VOR: ② Typifies early-60s studio films trying to address vanguard topics like mental illness and psychotherapy but feel too plastic and cautious about it.

David Miller's Lonely Are the Brave so totally blew me away yesterday that I thought I'd take a chance on his next film. I wasn't quite expecting a Formica-colored comedy-drama inside a military mental hospital, barely even trying to integrate its humor with its pathos. Captain Newman, M.D. is the kind of movie that dares you to ask why it's following an especially gruesome suicide with a mirthful brouhaha over a herd of sheep that's taken over an airport tarmac. Ostensibly holding it together is the performance of Gregory Peck, who developed the movie through his own production company. I'm usually content to spend time with Peck's handsome and tolerant gravitas, though he's not much more convincing here as a psychoanalyst than he was as an analysand in Hitchcock's Spellbound. As To Kill a Mockingbird makes clear, Peck is often most compelling as a pure gestalt of goodness and solidity; I'm not sure his gift lies in exploring or even emanating nuanced interior states.

Were Peck doing a more delicate, focused job with his role, Tony Curtis's obnoxious slapstick scene-stealing as Dr. Newman's chief orderly, Jake Leibowitz, would be even more intrusive. Angie Dickinson misses chance after chance to bring more to her part as Newman's semi-conscripted and semi-platonic colleague, Lt. Francie Corum. The movie's probably best-known today for earning Bobby Darin an unexpected Oscar nomination as an especially tortured patient, so heedlessly self-medicating that he may not even realize how close he is to the edge. I wouldn't call Darin's acting fine-tuned, but he sure gives himself over to Cpl. Tompkins's despair, and he sneaks more notes and ambiguities into his close-ups than another actor might have. Mostly I'm grateful to Darin for stealing so much thunder from Curtis, who seems like he wrote his speech mid-filming. Grade: C+

(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)

Academy Award Nominations:
	Best Supporting Actor: Bobby Darin
	Best Adapted Screenplay: Richard L. Breen, Phoebe Ephron, and Henry Ephron
	Best Sound: Waldon O. Watson

Golden Globe Nominations:
	Best Picture (Drama)
	Best Actor (Drama): Gregory Peck
	Best Supporting Actor: Bobby Darin
	Best Film Promoting International Understanding

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