But all their lies end on a Monday

[sovay]

I just finished watching The Man Who Found Himself (1937), a 67-minute RKO B-picture whose one-line summary on TCM was "A determined nurse puts a cocky surgeon back on track." I thought I was getting a hospital drama, not a two-thirds aviation tropetastic mashup of Buckaroo Banzai, "A Retrieved Reformation," and Only Angels Have Wings (1939). If only it were as good as its comparisons. A literally high-flying young surgeon's twin careers spin out in scandal when he involves a married woman in a fatal plane crash; after spending some months as an embittered hobo, he lands a job as an airfield mechanic and immediately attracts the attention of an air ambulance nurse who suspects he's more than he seems; several contrivances on the part of the nurse and the screenwriters later, he's been recognized as a skilled pilot but denies that his calm, professional handling of a patient who freaked out during a medevac points to any hospital experience; so naturally the climax finds him at the site of a horrific train derailment where an injured child needs an emergency operation and the doctor on the scene is too exhausted from hours of first response to attempt it safely, also he's our hero's estranged father to whom he once swore that he "wouldn't touch the medical profession with a banana stalk," and the nurse who was traveling on the same train is watching. What will our hero do? What kind of question is that? This movie does not ask the audience to suspend their disbelief; it tries to garrote it. It meanders around for half its runtime and then fires a feature's worth of melodrama at the screen. At every turn there's so much schmaltz and corn that you could bake it in a skillet. Its best feature is its dialogue, which throws out such rapid-fire almost-surrealisms as "Who's the high hat and monocle?", "A smart girl could make a sink propose a weekend in the mountains," and "You're going to get your nose caught in a lawnmower one of these days," this last addressed to an inquisitive reporter who really should have been Roscoe Karns. Its historical importance is that it furnished the first starring role of Joan Fontaine, who gets a special post-credits introduction of her own and otherwise smiles a lot into the camera. Mostly it made me want to rewatch Only Angels Have Wings, which I absolutely cannot afford tonight because we have to get up early and take ourselves and our documentation down to the insurance office, speaking of the medical profession. It's just that every time I see a Ford Trimotor, I think of Richard Barthelmess. I don't know if even he could have saved this story, but in some mythical pre-Code branch of the universe I'd have liked to see him try. I suspect the title was probably a lost cause in any era. With Dwight Frye as the patient who freaks out. I'm going to bed before I think any more about it.