Dr. Broadway

Macdonald Carey is Dr. Broadway, an habitue of the th Great White Way. He knows everyone and everyone knows him. After he saves Jean Phillips and gives her a hob as his receptionist, he's got to deliver money to an heiress. But Big Bad Clothier J. Carroll Naish threatens to give Miss Phillips a lead-lined suit and frame Carey into prison stripes unless he coughs up the money.

Mann is renowned as a great stylist, but the first episode of a B series by a first-time director with a new actor in the lead is not the place to look for individual touches. Despite having been an AD for a few years, Mann was not the polished director of top actors that he would be in the Jimmy Stewart westerns, nor the overblown epics of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He seems to be a director more interested in making his bones by getting enough pages of the script on film each shooting day: which is appropriate. Neither do I believe in the modified Runyonesque characters who inhabit his world. they lack individuality.

As for Macdonald Carey, he was the sort of competent actor that the movies brought up and spit out after a few years. Then it was back to making a living in the theater, or in Carey's case, a thirty-year run on DAYS OF OUR LIVES. That's not a sneer. Anyone who can hold a job for that long deserves respect.