Silver Screenings

We just discovered a new (to us) Barbara Stanwyck film, and we can’t wait to share it with you.

Internes Can’t Take Money (1937) is a Depression-era film with themes of desperate hope and exploitation. It’s about fulfilling dreams by doing the grunt work it takes. A man studies to become a doctor; a woman searches for her lost child.

Stanwyck stars as a young woman with a miserable past. Just look at her curriculum vitae:

• Widow of an unsuccessful bank robber
• (Wrongly imprisoned) ex-convict
• Mother of a toddler who’s been taken to an undisclosed orphanage

Talk about having the Chips Stacked Against You. However, Stanwyck’s character has one thing many during the Depression did not: A job. It gives her a respectability to which she clings, a trophy she presents to everyone, proof she’s a person of value.

One day she goes to a hospital to seek treatment for a burn, where she meets a young and handsome intern, Dr. Kildaire (Joel McCrea), a man with starched and ironed principles. There’s an immediate attraction between the two, but Stanwyck is a little preoccupied.

(Digression: The hospital where McCrea works is a stylish white edifice with an astonishing number of medical personnel. Don’t get too comfortable in the waiting room! A doctor will see you in seconds!)

So this film is not a romance. Stanwyck must find her daughter and, it turns out, she pays unsavoury characters for leads on the child’s whereabouts.

As for McCrea, he places common sense above ridiculous rules, but he will not sacrifice his principles. Nobody pushes him around, not even Stanwyck.

The film’s title, Internes Can’t Take Money, is one of the hospital’s rules. If you were a medical interne (spelled with the extra “E” at the end), you would not be allowed to accept cash gifts. This is to prevent the wealthy from getting the best service.

McCrae’s ethics are put to the test when he finds himself in the back room of a pub operating on a wounded criminal (Lloyd Nolan). A few days later, he’s handed an envelope from Nolan, stuffed with $1,000 in cash. When McCrea realizes what’s in the envelope, he is determined to give it back.

But Stanwyck has her eyes on this envelope, too, because another gangster has promised her a solid lead re: the whereabouts of her daughter. Alas, this particular information costs $1,000.

Here’s one of the paradoxes of this film: One gangster wants to give McCrea a thousand bucks, while another wants to bleed it out of Stanwyck.

Watch Stanwyck’s face when she learns McCrea has $1,000 cash in his coat pocket, right now, within arm’s reach. The money that could finally find her daughter.

As an audience member, you’re conflicted. You don’t want her to steal the money, but you do want her to have it. You don’t want her to return to jail, but you need to know where that kid has been. Watch Stanwyck reach inside McCrea’s coat as it lays on the back of a chair…

The real criminals in this movie do not include Stanwyck or Nolan. The real criminals are the crooks who market Stanwyck’s desperation. Her single-minded determination has made her a lucrative mark and has turned her hopes into a commodity.

The criminals offer her leads – at various prices – knowing Stanwyck will bite. She’ll pay whatever they ask because she can’t risk passing up any information, ever.

Internes Can’t Take Money was the first Dr. Kildaire movie, filmed at Paramount Studios and based on a 1936 short story by author Max Brand (a.k.a. Frederick Schiller Faust). The following year, MGM bought the rights to the stories and made nine movies between 1938 and 1940, starring Lew Ayres.

Brand, meanwhile, started writing Dr. Kildaire novels, publishing seven of them before his death in 1944. He volunteered as a wartime correspondent and traveled to Italy with the U.S. military. He was subsequently wounded by shrapnel and died shortly afterward.

This first Dr. Kildaire movie has some marvelous lines. In one scene, Stanwyck visits an orphanage run by nuns. The head nun is sympathetic to Stanwyck’s plight, but she offers some world-weary advice: “I must caution you. Many mothers come here with hope in their hearts, only to go away disappointed. Hope sometimes can be a false prophet.”

Yet it’s not a film without humour. In another scene, Nolan is scheming with his underlings when there’s a knock at the door.
Gangster: “Maybe it’s the cops.”
Nolan: “Cops don’t knock. They break in.”

Please take the opportunity to watch Internes Can’t Take Money. It’s a tense, thoughtful film with a clear-eyed view of human nature.

Internes Can’t Take Money starring Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea, Lloyd Nolan. Directed by Alfred Santell. Written by Rian James & Theodore Reeves. Paramount Pictures, 1937, B&W, 78 mins.