The New Interns (1964)

Director: John Rich

Cast: Michael Callan, Dean Jones, Telly Savalas

Synopsis: Young doctors mix romance with their careers in a big-city hospital.

John Rich’s The New Interns is unremarkable other than the fact that it features many TV actors at the start of their careers – Stefanie Powers, Greg Morris, Dean Jones, Michael Callan – as well as George Segal (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Owl and the Pussycat) in his movie debut. He is probably the best thing about this overwrought melodrama, playing a hot-headed intern who has to operate on the gang member who raped his girlfriend. The New Interns is full of situations like that, all of which are neatly resolved in the two-hour plus running time. Only rarely remaining on the right side of sentimentality, this movie sometimes plays like one of those unfunny parodies; cloying music swells and soars to alert the less attentive viewer to the appropriate moment to feel the tears welling up.

The New Interns also looks like it was made on the cheap, with some pretty shoddy sets and the majority of exterior scenes taking place at night, and the quality of acting (with a few exceptions) and writing are commensurate with a limited budget. One of the few bright spots: dear old Telly Savalas (Cape Fear, Bandera Bandits) chewing the scenery in his regrettably few scenes.

(Reviewed 3rd March 2002)