People Will Talk (1951)

Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Professor Elwell (Hume Cronyn), a little man in more ways than one, is trying to get dirt on his fellow medical professor, the popular Dr. Noah Praetorius (Cary Grant). In his office is a beak-nosed lady (Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West) who seems prime for spite and slander.
     “If I come in, does the door get closed?” she asks.
     “Naturally,” says Professor Elwell.
     “Then I don’t come in.”
     “Why not?”
     “You know why not. You’re grown up.”
     “My dear Mrs. Pickett,” the professor begins, but she cuts him off.
     “Miss Pickett, and don’t butter me up!”
     “I have conducted my affairs behind closed doors for twenty years,” says the professor.
     “Not with me.”
     He looks her over with patient disdain. “You overestimate both of us,” he says.
     That’s from the opening scene in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s subtle morality play, People Will Talk (1951). Mankiewicz was a man of the free-speech left, and it’s easy to suppose he was thinking of the campaigns against fellow directors and actors in the heyday of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
     Yet People Will Talk is a profoundly conservative film, affirming the goodness of the most fundamental human relations. Dr. Noah Praetorius is a beloved teacher, the conductor of the school’s choir and orchestra, and the originator of a new clinic for a more human practice of medicine. But nobody knows about his past. Giving opportunity for suspicion, he is followed everywhere by a fearfully large and taciturn old gentleman, Mr. Shunderson (Finlay Currie; see him as Balthasar in Ben-Hur, and as Abel Magwitch in David Lean’s Great Expectations). Shunderson has no job. Dr. Praetorius says only that he’s his friend, and it’s nobody’s business why he stays at his side. Professor Elwell seeks to get at Praetorius through Shunderson.
     Meanwhile, a young coed (Jeanne Crain) has fallen in love with Praetorius, but she too has a problem. When she faints in an anatomy class – a cadaver of a young woman lies on the table – she ends up being the doctor’s patient. She learns to her shame that she did not faint because she saw a dead body. She is with child. The father was a man she hardly knew, whom she thought she loved, but who was soon after killed in the Korean War. Her own father (Sidney Blackmer) is gentle, intelligent, morally upright, and proud of her as his only accomplishment in life. He’s failed at everything else, so he and she live as wards on the farm of his unsympathetic brother. Miss Higgins believes it would destroy her father if he should find out about her moral lapse. In despair, she tries to take her own life.
     From what I’ve said, it appears that People Will Talk skates on the edge of darkness. If it does, it executes a perfect figure-8. The film is bright and human, a story of love, gratitude, mercy, and compassion. “I made sick people well!” says Dr. Praetorius, when Elwell charges him of having been a quack, just because he used to live in a down-state village, working as a butcher and letting the people believe he had a power to heal. “And as to the willingness of those so-called ignorant and backward people to rely upon the curative powers of faith and possibly miracles too,” he says to Elwell, “I consider faith properly injected into a patient as effective in maintaining life as adrenaline. And the belief in miracles has been the difference between living and dying as often as any surgeon’s scalpel.”
     What happens to the girl and her baby? What about her father? We guess that Elwell will fail – but how? Dear reader, you’ll have to watch the film to find out. I will say that if you were given a hundred years, you would never guess Shunderson’s secret. Nor will you ever guess the final scene, full of the music of that old college song Gaudeamus Igitur, when a woman makes one motion of her hand – one motion, that means all the world.