Thursday Movie Picks, July 13, 2023: Book Adaptations

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This month, the movie theme is "Book Adaptations", which is unsurprisingly a fairly broad theme. I decided to go with a theme within a theme, and pick three movies, and pick three movies based on books about doctors. Two of the authors were in fact doctors, although the third was a minister:

The Citadel (1938). A.J. Cronin wrote this book about a British doctor (Robert Donat) who starts off working as the staff doctor for a bunch of coal miners, only to find that they want him to let them be malingerers. He moves to London where an old friend (Rex Harrison) gets him to work with rich clients, but his wife (Rosalind Russell) eventually convinces him to go back to working with the poor.

Magnificent Obsession (1954). Minister Lloyd C. Douglas wrote a bunch of heavy-handed books, starting with this one back in the late 1920s. It was made into a movie in the mid-1930s, but the material is ripe for the equally heavy-handed Douglas Sirk to make it into a melodrama. Rock Hudson plays a playboy who gets blamed for the killing of a beloved doctor because he needs the medical equipment at the same time it could have saved the doctor's life. The doctor's widow (Jane Wyman) hates Hudson for it, and things get worse when Hudson inadvertently causes an accident that blinds Wyman. Hudson decides he's going to become a doctor so he can do medical research that will restore Wyman's eyesight.

Coma (1978). Robin Cook wrote the book turned into this movie, in which a doctor (Geneviève Bujold) suffers the loss of a friend in an operation when the friend doesn't come out of anesthesia. Bujold investigates and gets the distinct impression that there's a lot more going on than meets the eye. Her boyfriend (Michael Douglas) wants to help her but can't be too up front about it, while her ultimate boss (Richard Widmark) is clearly trying to stop her.