Doctors' Wives (1971) (original) (raw)
Synopsis
Doctors' Wives have everything. Except husbands.
The wives of several high-powered doctors feel neglected due to their husbands' focus on their careers, so they embark on a regimen of sex, drugs and booze.
Cast
Popular reviews
Eight months before his career as a leading man really took off with his Oscar-winning turn in 1971's Best Picture winner The French Connection, Gene Hackman seems hardly destined for accolades or stardom in Doctors' Wives, a forgotten melodrama that stands as one of the actor's worst movies of the '70s or any time.
Adapted from Frank G. Slaughter's 1967 novel of the same name, Doctors' Wives seems to set out to be shocking or salacious with its themes of passion and infidelity in the lives of doctors and their wives. It is neither of those things. A brain surgeon shoots his wife and her lover, eliminating top-billed Dyan Cannon from the picture rather soon. Her career was taking off…
De Niro, Hackman, Hoffman, Nicholson and Pacino...a journey
It has been a while since my last entry for this project. That's partly because this film was such a devil to get hold of. I ended up buying a Spanish DVD. Hospital Hora Cero, in case you were wondering. Once I figured how to navigate the menu screen I changed the language to Ingles and off I went.
It wasn't really worth all of the effort. Other Letterboxders have described this as a trashy soap opera. They're correct in that summation. Everyone in this hospital is 'balling' each other and 'making it'. You can't move for people making stuff in this movie! Also the lingo isn't quite lost…
Faux Otto Preminger picture adapted from a novel by a Jacqueline Susann wannabe. One of those sad, outdated studio attempts to make something hip and sexy. There's really only one reason to watch this and that's to marvel at a trio of extraordinary actresses, each of whom left too small a body a work behind them: Diana Sands, Janice Rule, and Rachel Roberts. Wish I could list the glorious Dyan Cannon as one of its attributes but she's gone before 10 minutes have passed.
Also, I'll park this here: the always bland Richard Crenna. Why? How?
I thought this would be better. It was probably foolish of me to think so, based on its low rating on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb, and the fact that even with an impressive cast, Doctors' Wives has been all but forgotten. But Rotten Tomatoes certainly isn't gospel (no need for me to go on a whole rant here but the Rotten Tomatoes percentage system is inherently flawed as a method for showing how good a movie is), and learning there was a Gene Hackman-starring soap opera from his prime years of handsomeness that I hadn't seen had me hoping for the best, for perhaps a wrongly maligned romantic gem waiting for rediscovery. Basically, I wanted Bobby Deerfield, but for Gene…
I must say that it is pretty amusing to see Gene Hackman credited after Richard Crenna in a movie that come out the same year as The French Connection. There isn’t many other amusing things about it I’m afraid even reliable Hackman is straitjacket in it. Doctor’s Wives belongs to what might be my least favorite movie genres, the sociological soap opera and has most of its dull worst of both worlds trappings. Like most of those, Doctor’s Wives employs a good number of talented people in front of the camera they are mostly drained of what makes them good but a baseline professionalism is probably what keeps it watchable. This was directed with very little energy by one George…
Deliciously trashy high gloss soap opera straddling two eras.
At times it seems to want to be very edgy and modern with a prolonged surgical episode with graphic footage of a heart operation (that honestly doesn't belong in this type of movie) and at others a wallow in salacious infidelity and other contretemps among the title group and their mates. Then out of the blue it threatens to become a cop drama before turning into a story of betrayal.
Coming at the end of the big studio era, though theoretically an independent production it was produced in conjunction with Columbia, the film has a sheen that was a hallmark of that period. Everything is color coordinated with the various stars…
Is it good? Debatable…but going in blind, I was pleasantly surprised and wildly entertained.
There is an absolutely stacked cast (highlighted by Hackman & Crenna reuniting after their turn together in the space drama, MAROONED, & a pre-LA Lakers staple Dyan Cannon at her peak 70’s hotness)
Notably plenty of (for the era) boundary pushing, crazy twists & turns and more rapid fire medical jargon & (graphic) surgical procedures than an episode of ER.
And there’s enough melodrama & sexual shenanigans to make a modern day soap opera blush…
Notoriously difficult to stream, there is a stream up on YouTube (as of 4/2024). Just go in with realistic (low) expectations and blind and you’ll enjoy the wild 70’s ride.
George Schaefer’s drama in which a physician’s over-sexed wife confesses to having romances with a number of his colleagues. Starring Dyan Cannon, Gene Hackman and Rachel Roberts.
Adapted from the novel of the same name by Frank G> Slaughter, which was published four years earlier, the story concerns the dysfunctional marriages of a number of miserable wealthy doctors who are employed at a not public clinic, and their abandoned wives who deal with their individual sorrow in a number of ways who enter crisis mode after one of them kills his cheating wife.
Dyan Cannon gives an okay performance in her role as the woman whose attempts to have a fair few steamy encounters with the male doctors doesn’t go…
All the 70s sleaze you could hope for.
As other people have noted, ‘Doctor’s Wives’ is a soap opera, albeit one with a single episode.
It has typical soap opera elements, a central location (a teaching hospital) & a few satellite locations in the form of the respective bedrooms and dining rooms of the ensemble cast; standardized plot elements: crime (a murder), drama (addiction, infidelity), comedy (of a sort that doesn’t translate particularly well 50 some years later); a hilarious one-shot focusing on various characters as they deliver internal monologues via voice over; an absurdly arch, eyebrow-raising ‘villain;’ and so on.
Coming right after the ‘free-love’ ‘60s, most of the male characters have (or have been) having sex with anyone but their respective spouses/partners and, if not, they are…
This movie is so diabolical in its refusal to follow any kind of storytelling standards that it is amazing and I love it. And the soundtrack is equally diabolical! It somehow gives the impression of being funny without ever being funny, and that is kind of funny actually. My only critique is it could use a few more long surgery scenes.
The first five minutes of this led me to believe I was in for some genuinely outrageous Jacqueline Susann-style trashy fun.
After the first five minutes: what a letdown -- an incredible bore.