Redwarmin This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Kailansorac Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Byrdz Stanley Kramer's first directorial effort. Based on a best selling book. Major movie stars all around. Sadly a rather ho-hum picture.Mitchum is just too ... too... "Mitchum" for this one. He is stoic to the point of immobility. He is also too old to be a medical school student. It's hard to actually care about his financial and romantic problems because he is so self absorbed and self contained to be believed. Sinatra is better at bringing his character to life BUT he does seem like a replay of Eternity's Magio only without Fatso beating him up. One outstanding scene does involve Mitchum really getting on his case.Lee Marvin is in the cast as another medical student. Not a big part, but he IS there. Lon Chaney,Jr is painfully effective as the alcoholic father ( he also has a small role in Kramer's "The Defiant Ones" a couple of years later) The picture perks up once the doctors get into medical practice for themselves. Charles Bickford and Gloria Grahame playing their usual roles but playing them well. Locationwise, it's the biggest "small town" I have ever seen in a film. It's a city, what were they thinking ? The music swells. Olivia deHaviland chews the scenery in her sweet and then angry mode.Nothing new, nothing really special. Medical melodrama of its time.

T Y 40 minutes into this movie I'm thinking, "this dud has got to be over soon." I look down and check the running time and I am horrified to see that somehow it's 2 hours and 20 minutes long. 40 mins and I'm thinking omg, where is this obvious, interminable melodrama going? 40 mins in, and I'm thinking this might be a good time to settle on a genre. And I'm wondering, why on earth would DeHaviland take this degrading, 1-dimensional ethnic role? Why do they tease this out so laboriously? How did so much star power sign on to this undeveloped, inept movie? It must be this padded and pointless, to provide each of 5 or 6 major egos their own moment; all of them are wildly unrelated to the general flow of Mitchum's "big conflict" storyline, which is of no dramatic interest. What is the point? The only possible angle I can imagine for this movie is that it was a women's movie about men; and that female viewers in 1955 might imagine this oddity spoke to them, about their situations. Along with the unusually low quality of the script, a viewer will spend all his/her time picking the corn kernels out of the ham. And every frame of this looks like it was filmed on the cheap. Completely squandered, expensive cast.

Rob-120 This movie is proof that a good director and great actors can still make a dull movie. In "Not As A Stranger," Lucas Marsh (Robert Mitchum) is a university medical student who has plenty of talent and determination to be a doctor, but very little heart. After his drunken father (Lon Chaney) spends his tuition money, Marsh will do anything to stay in medical school. He marries Kristina Hedvigson (Olivia De Havilland), a Scandinavian nurse that he does not love, but who can support his tuition. Marsh becomes a doctor, then moves to a small town called Greenville to work in a local hospital.Part of the problem with the movie is that Mitchum and his fellow medical students -- played by Frank Sinatra and Lee Marvin -- are too old to be believable as medical students. These are men in their late thirties and early forties, who look as if they should already be in medical practice, if not *teaching* medical classes. I was amazed to see Sinatra in a supporting role, since by this time, he was one of the major leading stars of Hollywood.Also, Olivia De Havilland is too old and too beautiful to be believable as an old maid nurse who has never married. (Her Swedish accent isn't very believable, either. Nor is it believable that Harry Morgan and Mae Clarke would be old enough to be her parents.) The operating room scenes, though dated, are the best scenes in the movie. The rest of the movie is a by-the-numbers soap opera that hits every last cliché right on the nose. It's like "General Hospital," but with more characters who are actually doctors and nurses and not just hunks, babes, or femme fatales.There are some unintentionally-funny scenes, such as when Marsh has an affair with Harriet Lang (Gloria Grahame), a young heiress who trains horses. (You can see this affair coming even before Grahame's character appears, over an hour into the movie.) After lustily staring at Lang in a few previous scenes, Marsh encounters her outside a stable. In a nearby corral is a black mare; in the stable stall is a lust-crazed white stallion who is bucking, kicking, whinnying, desperate to join the mare in the corral. Marsh unleashes his passion for Harriet Lang by literally "letting loose the wild horse." The movie has one really well-directed sequence, the final sequence in which Marsh performs an emergency operation. Aside from that, the rest of the movie is a forgettable, by-the-numbers melodrama. Even the title doesn't make any sense. And why did it get an Oscar nomination for Best Sound, of all things?

imogensara_smith With a cast including Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, Broderick Crawford, Lee Marvin and Gloria Grahame, you'd expect hard-boiled crime drama. If so, you might want your money back after seeing NOT AS A STRANGER. One Hollywood wag remarked of the Mitchum-Sinatra-Crawford-Marvin lineup, "That's not a cast, that's a brewery!" and the actors lived up to their rowdy reputations, turning the shooting into "ten weeks of hell" for director Stanley Kramer. Mitchum described Crawford swallowing Sinatra's hairpiece with a vodka chaser (Of course, you never know when Mitchum is putting you on. But I like to believe he did call up Sinatra in Palm Springs to say, "Guess what? The Crawdad just drank your wig.") Sinatra took to calling Mitchum "mother" after he nursed Ol' Blue Eyes through a hangover. It's too bad Kramer didn't film these on-set antics; the footage would have been more entertaining than the plodding and earnest medical melodrama he did produce.The casting is spectacularly misguided; for a start, everyone is almost twenty years too old. The film opens with the 40-ish Mitchum, Sinatra and Marvin as medical students observing a dissection, and right away credibility is strained. (If I walked into a doctor's office and saw Lee Marvin in a white coat, I would run.) And whose idea was it to cast the famously jaded, take-it-or-leave-it Mitchum as the rigid, idealistic, driven hero? Only top-billed Olivia de Havilland seems to belong in this type of movie, and she suffers from a platinum dye job and a mediocre Garbo accent. I waited more than an hour for Gloria Grahame to show up, and then she was wasted on a throwaway subplot that's over almost before it begins.No cast could have made the movie much good. It's overlong, and the script is both obvious and underwritten; a few minutes into every scene I could predict what was going to happen by the end, and I foresaw the final plot twist about halfway through the film. The first half follows Lucas Marsh (Robert Mitchum) through medical school. For reasons never entirely clear he is obsessed with becoming a doctor, though his father (who drank up all the money his mother left to pay his tuition) tells him, "I don't think you'll make it. It's not enough to have a brain, you have to have a heart." Thus in the third scene we get the message of the movie, and have a pretty good idea of everything that will follow. Desperate for money to stay in school, Luke woos and marries Kristina (Olivia de Havilland), a frumpy Swedish nurse who—for reasons never entirely clear—is madly in love with him. (We know because she keeps telling him, "I love you SO MUCH!") It's made abundantly clear that Luke is brilliant and noble-minded—he despises the other students who just want to make a lot of money—but arrogant and intolerant of human frailty. In his first practice, assisting a kindly and intelligent small-town doctor (Charles Bickford) he does a wonderful job, but his marriage disintegrates as he falls for a seductive wealthy widow and his wife can't bring herself to tell him she's pregnant. You just know that sooner or later he's going to falter at the operating table and be shattered by the realization that He Too is Only Human.To this oppressive script, add heavy-handed direction that hammers each point home with obvious symbolism and simplistic montages (and a few--but not enough--moments of unintentional hilarity like the whinnying stallion underscoring the first big Mitchum-Grahame clinch), and the most relentlessly overwrought music I've ever heard. No one except Sinatra, playing the only light-hearted role, manages to crawl out from under the lead blanket of this movie. My admiration for Robert Mitchum knows no bounds, and I wouldn't say he's bad here, but he's certainly been better. It's not that he's incapable of playing characters who care deeply or zealously pursue a goal (See HEAVEN KNOWS, MR. ALLISON or NIGHT OF THE HUNTER.) The problem is that Lucas Marsh is humorless, uptight and self-righteous, devoid of that perceptive, ironic, compassionate distance that's essential to Mitchum. Marsh is hot tempered, intolerant of others and blind to his own flaws—in other words, it's a Kirk Douglas part. Kirk would have been perfect, but Mitchum never really connects with the character. Maybe it just didn't seem worthwhile: Mitchum never gave more to a movie than it deserved. He does have some nice moments: the encounter with his pathetic father gives some explanation for why he's so disgusted by weakness; he plays well with Sinatra, strikes some sparks with Gloria Grahame, and excellently delineates Luke's feelings for his wife, a mix of boredom, admiration and guilt. He's pretty convincing in the doctoring scenes (there are way too many of these, at least for someone like me who gets woozy at the sight of a hypodermic needle.) But he seems a little bored most of the time, not that I blame him. Maybe I should have taken my cue from the actors and had a few drinks on hand.