The Flame Within

I've got an acquaintance on a non-movie internet forum I frequent who's a psychiatrist of some reknown. One time, I accidentally compared him to a psychologist, and a fair bit of humor ensued over the idea that anybody would do something so scandalous as referring to the guy as a psychologist. Anyhow, I bring this up because I couldn't help but think of that acquaintance as I was watching the movie The Flame Within.

Ann Harding plays the psychiatrist in question, one named Dr. Mary White, although she really does seem closer to the popular perception of a psychologist, and the amount of stuff that could have passed for pop psychology decades later surprised me. There's a fellow doctor, Dr. Gordon Phillips (Herbert Marshall), who loves her and wants to marry her, but the movie was released in 1935 and everybody thinks marriage means Mary would have to give up her career which she's reluctant to do because psychiatry is a cutting-edge field and she wants to be a pioneer. (Who can blame her?)

Into this comes a patient, which ought not be surprising since these people are after all doctors. That patient is the idle rich young woman Lillian Belton (Maureen O'Sullivan), who has just tried to commit suicide, which is a decided no-no under the Production Code. Only evil people would do that. Lillian is brought to Dr. White's posh upper-story apartment/office, and in the course of one session tries to commit suicide again by jumping out the window! It turns out that Lillian was in Paris last season, and met another idle rich man, Jack Kerry (Louis Hayward). She immediately fell in love with him, although he only saw her as a friend at most. His true love is alcohol. Lillian thinks she can reform Jack and wants him to be with her instead of the bottle.

So Drs. White and Phillips get in touch with Jack and get him to have a session with Dr. White. And over the course of several sessions, Dr. White finally convinces Jack to stop drinking and to try to get a job, in this case in airplane design although the job seems to have more to do with the passenger cabin than what we traditionally think of as aerospace.

The only cath is what in pop psychology would be called, if memory serves, transference. Dr. White having helped Jack, he thinks she's the right woman for him, not Lillian! And so naturally he starts gettin the hots for Dr. White and that makes Lillian unhappy. Now perhaps if Dr. White had been a psychologist she would have understood all this. But she's supposed to be a psychiatrist, so she doesn't see any of this. And while she doesn't actively try to take Jack away from Lillian, she doesn't actively try to stop his pursuing her while being married to Lillian. At least, not until Dr. Phillips has an intervention with her.

I suppose there might have been an interesting idea at the core of The Flame Within. But boy is that brought down by the script. On the bright side, it all comes crashing down so hard that the movie is unintenionally funny at times. The ending is pure Production Code and might enrage some people, but I saw it as just another symptom of how much of a mess the movie is. All of the actors try their best, but the can't overcome the turkey of a script.

Thankfully, The Flame Within is programmer-length, so watching it crash and burn won't take too much of your time. And it really is worth one watch if you're in the mood to watch the sort of movie that crashes and burns.