netwallah Review of Doctor Bull

Doctor Bull (1933)

Will Rogers is wonderful as a gentle small-town doctor

[8/10 · 2 July 2006]

A very nice small movie. An old doctor in New Winton, a small Connecticut town, George Bull (Will Rogers) knows everybody, makes endless housecalls, lives with his old aunt who calls him by the wrong name, and is sweet on the widow Janet Cardmaker (Vera Allen), sister of the big snooty family. The town goes along as usual, with a lot of gossip about the doctor spending so much time at the widow's house, and babies getting born, and a scratchy-voiced hypochondriacal soda jerk (Andy Devine), and the doctor curing an ailing cow, and the doctor trying to help a young man paralyzed by a fall, and the doctor helping the snooty family's daughter escape through marriage, and the snooty patriarch building some kind of construction camp too near the river, and then a typhoid epidemic, and opposition from the townsfolk, and a nasty town meeting called to oust him, and then he figures out a way of translating his cow-cure to the young man, cures him, and marries the widow. All very tidy local colour, complete with some good character-actor faces, and the business of starting and finishing the movie—and carrying on a lot of its action—at the train station and the post-office is really effective. What makes the movie way better than okay is the presence of Will Rogers, who projects kindness and good nature in his shambling way, seemingly without trying. Most of the time he hangs his head sort of sheepishly, and looks up, like a good man in his 50s still partly boyish even as he's committed to doing good in the world—and he does it well.