Kings Row (1942)

Directed by Sam Wood

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In his Confessions, Saint Augustine recalls seeing a play about the classical Greek models of friendship, Pylades and Orestes. There was a scene in which Orestes was to be condemned to death, but nobody in the faraway land knew Orestes by sight, and so Pylades attempted to take his friend’s place, and the result was that both young men put themselves forward at once, each claiming to be the real Orestes, so that his friend could live. “But I’m Orestes!” each of them cries, and Augustine tells us that the audience rose up right then in the middle of the scene and gave the actors a standing ovation. Such was the esteem in which the ancients, at their best, held the true friend.

In the case of those two cousins, each pressing forward to die in place of the other, we have a recognition that the friend is more valuable than the feelings involved in the friendship. But we can, I think, put friendship to a sterner test than death. And we see that test at the climax of our Film of the Week, Kings Row.

It is the story of an apparently pleasant town by that name, but we learn early on that beneath the pleasantry there is the usual strain of social bigotry directed by the cultured class against the people who live on the wrong side of town, and more than that, real madness, wickedness, and hate. Those evils are largely centered on the two doctors in town. One of them is highly sophisticated and learned, Dr. Tower (Claude Rains — who else?), who is married to a madwoman. He suspects that the madness is hereditary, and this suspicion induces him to do things supposedly to protect his daughter, but they drive her into loneliness and the very madness he feared. The other, Dr. Gordon (Charles Coburn, in a rare role as someone sinister), appears more affable, is far better loved than Dr. Tower is, but he is a butcher, motivated by hatred of things he sees as evil. And he too has a daughter whom he desires, in a perverse and destructive way, to protect.

At the heart of the film, though, is the friendship between two men, a friendship that began when they were boys, and that involved also the daughters of both doctors, and a working class girl, a tomboy named Randy (Ann Sheridan, sterling in a role that is the direct opposite of her suave snob in The Man Who Came to Dinner). Parris Mitchell (Bob Cummings, cherubic and as young as you’ll see him) is a well-to-do and educated young fellow, who first studies medicine under Dr. Tower, and who then, on Tower’s suggestion and with his recommendation, goes to Vienna to study psychiatry, quite a new discipline at the turn of the 1900’s, when the film’s main action is set. Drake Monaghan (Ronald Reagan, in what he considered his best role ever) is an innocently mischievous cut-up from the working class, but he’s got drive, and he’s going places — till his funds are wiped out by chicanery at the local bank. He ends up having to work at a train depot, and that is where the accident occurs that puts his friendship with Mitchell, and his love for Randy, to the test.

What will you do to save your friend? Dr. Mitchell faces a couple of choices. He can, with plenty of justification, and well within the bounds of legality, commit Dr. Gordon’s daughter — Gordon is now dead — to an asylum. I won’t reveal why that matters. He can continue to smile and to encourage and to pity his friend, and that is what Randy, who is now Drake’s wife, wishes. But there is a third choice, one that puts the friendship itself in jeopardy. Would you take the risk, for your friend, that he will break down completely, and hate you for the rest of his life, or at the least not ever want to see your face again?

When somebody approached the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, and as a test told him that his son was dead, Epictetus replied, “And since when did I ever say he was immortal?” Epictetus, a Greek slave whose sayings were preserved for us by his disciples, wasn’t as cold as that anecdote suggests. But in the severer of the Stoics, there was always something like an amputation followed by cautery. To protect themselves against being misled by their passions, they attempted to stifle them or to harden their hearts against them. Yet it is true that real love is not the same as the feeling. But man is a rational creature whose passions are to be rightly ordered — easier said than done! Kings Row is best viewed as a drama wherein many a character, sometimes out of genuine love, and sometimes out of hatred in disguise, stifles a passion, or maintains silence so as not to disturb someone else; and others indulge their passions, calling it love when it is something else. Somehow, Dr. Mitchell, a man of deep feeling, must find the best way to help his friend, even against the current of his feelings, yet it is his friendship that moves him to do so, when someone a little less of a friend might Watch the film and tell us what you think.

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