OVP: The Citadel (1938)

Film: The Citadel (1938)

Stars: Robert Donat, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Richardson, Rex Harrison, Penelope Dudley Ward

Director: King Vidor

Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Actor-Robert Donat, Adapted Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

When you are reviewing films, you need to be aware of your own particular genre biases.  I see a lot of movies, frequently ones that are favored by the Oscars (due to our ongoing "Oscar Viewing Project" on the blog), and with that it becomes a situation where genres that the Academy favors, but I don't, become a point-of-contention unless a movie is truly great (and thus genre becomes irrelevant).  This is never more true than "uplifting dramas," which have been a staple of the Academy's for decades (though in recent years this have largely been true stories or biopics rather than based on wholly original creations), a genre that I don't find all that interesting.  The Citadel is a good example of this.  This is a fine film, it has a lot of vigor and fulfills its purpose-it's a worthwhile undertaking.  But I must admit that while I can respect the film, I didn't like it.  Let's get into why, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is the story of Andrew Manson (Donat), an idealistic young doctor who goes to a coal mining community in Wales and starts to treat tuberculosis.  He starts out as someone who works entirely by-the-book, but finds that bending the rules is a better way to get solid treatment for his patients (and earn their respect).  He is a far better doctor than they would normally be able to afford, but resists calls to go after bigger paychecks.  However, after his research is destroyed by the nearby miners, he moves to London, with a newly-found wife in tow, a local schoolteacher named Christine (Russell), and begins to practice a type of pseudo-medicine where he treats wealthy people for ailments that aren't real (essentially hypochondriacs), for a life of comfort, prestige, and wealth.  His wife doesn't like this, seeing the sort of man that her husband is becoming, and this all comes to a head when Manson's old friend Denny (Richardson) shows him that he's changed, and when Denny dies after an accident at the hands of one of Manson's fellow charlatan doctors, he decides to return to what he was good at, curing the sick & impoverished people who don't get fair access to healthcare.

The Citadel is surely a movie that, while parts of it are a bit green (more on that in a second), has a message that is sadly resonant over eighty years later.  The film is set in the UK, but even as an American now I can see that access to quality healthcare is largely the dictate of a person's financial status.  Medicine & surgery are expensive, frequently bankrupting people in a near criminal way, and almost always attached to your employment status, so the wealthiest people can gain access to treatments that poor people would only dream of seeing-in this way, The Citadel still feels quite relevant today.

But for me, it struggles in this conversation by having Manson played less-than-complexly, which is a shame because as written this is a complicated character.  Manson has a point here-he is fought, frequently, by the people that he's trying to help.  The scene at about the movie's midpoint where the local miners, spurred on by rumors about what he's doing to laboratory guinea pigs and fears of the unknown around him in his research into the adverse effects of coal mining on your health (something we take for granted today), destroy his work, the work that's literally trying to save their lives, is harrowing stuff.  It's the kind of crux that should have been intriguing for the audience-Manson is essentially being punished for doing the right thing, other people's prejudices getting in the way of him saving their lives (I don't need to make the obvious Covid vaccine allusion to show you this is also still relevant, mostly because if you're reading this you were surely thinking it), and it should inform the character quite a bit.

But Donat plays Manson as kind of naive, never imagining him in a serious way.  The English actor, who won his first Oscar nomination for this performance, was three years removed from his classic work in The 39 Steps (which I like & enjoy him in, for the record), but this doesn't have that film's finesse.  It's the kind of work that screams "GREAT ACTING!" in a major way, mostly because it's a series of lengthy, oftentimes powerfully-delivered monologues, but there's nothing happening below the placid surface here.  His switch into a snobbish fop is so full, but you don't get any hints of that coming in the first half.  Donat doesn't find a way to bridge the man that he's playing between the three acts, and the film suffers.  Rosalind Russell is better as his fellow lead, particularly in the film's first half when she gets to play a sharper character, getting at least some good chemistry moments with the befuddled doctor, though as the movie's melodrama wears on, she begins to falter as well into subdued dramatics (potentially unpopular opinion-I've never liked Roz Russell in a drama despite that being kind of what the Academy always found her useful for, but I think she's aces at comedy).

All of this dampens my enjoyment of The Citadel.  It's a good movie on a technical level, and so I'm giving it three stars.  The early courting scenes with Donat/Russell are fun, and the script is well-constructed & the directing is efficient.  But I didn't feel it-the message here is important, and it carries a lot of weight even today, but Donat's inability to elevate Manson through the film's three acts kept me from loving it in the way that I would something like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and there is so little outside of what he's doing onscreen to latch onto (I believe he's in every single scene in the movie if memory serves correctly) that I left respecting, but not loving, what had just happened.