Whether you like Mankiewicz or not (generally, I find his films too melodramatic), this one is very worth watching just as a window into the past.
It was released in 1950, and gives a fascinating critique of race in America when Martin Luther King, Jr., was still in Divinity School. The resentments and misconceptions of the various characters -- the white hospital administrator who believes graduating black doctors will increase funding, the black elevator operator who believes black doctors have to pass tests white doctors don't. Then there is the depiction of racism as virulent, irrational, and pathological -- Widmark takes the bus to crazy-town and doesn't take a transfer for the return trip.
But the one character that holds everything together is Linda Darnell's Edie Johnson. She's the character who develops -- everyone else is basically static. She's a lot like Widmark's Ray Biddle. As a woman from the wrong side of the tracks, she's not gotten a lot of breaks. So she's prey to his "blame-the-negro" rhetoric. But the best scene in the movie is one in which she is in her apartment with Biddle's brother George. She hears a domestic dispute out the window, and maybe it is a coincidence, but it spurs her to action -- and the action she takes is the hinge for the end of the movie.
So while this movie had a lot of Drama (Widmark chews the scenery in a way the more understated Poitier is generally able to avoid), it was truly fascinating.
It was released in 1950, and gives a fascinating critique of race in America when Martin Luther King, Jr., was still in Divinity School. The resentments and misconceptions of the various characters -- the white hospital administrator who believes graduating black doctors will increase funding, the black elevator operator who believes black doctors have to pass tests white doctors don't. Then there is the depiction of racism as virulent, irrational, and pathological -- Widmark takes the bus to crazy-town and doesn't take a transfer for the return trip.
But the one character that holds everything together is Linda Darnell's Edie Johnson. She's the character who develops -- everyone else is basically static. She's a lot like Widmark's Ray Biddle. As a woman from the wrong side of the tracks, she's not gotten a lot of breaks. So she's prey to his "blame-the-negro" rhetoric. But the best scene in the movie is one in which she is in her apartment with Biddle's brother George. She hears a domestic dispute out the window, and maybe it is a coincidence, but it spurs her to action -- and the action she takes is the hinge for the end of the movie.
So while this movie had a lot of Drama (Widmark chews the scenery in a way the more understated Poitier is generally able to avoid), it was truly fascinating.