The original soap.
Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra and Lee Marvin as medical students. Broderick Crawford as their tutor. Olivia de Havilland as a Swedish nurse. A smouldering Gloria Graham as the femme fatale. Charles Bickford as a country doctor. Lon Chaney Jr as Mitchum's father. I kid you not. This is wonderful entertainment and has been described as the forefather of every soap opera. The hospital sequences are convincing because the cast went to the bother of doing some research. Apparently, Mitchum got so involved he could have made the grade as an MD with a bit more time. Buy and enjoy.

Lethargic Medical Soap Opera Has Moments of Realism But Suffers from Serious Miscasting
A turgid, overlong soap opera, this 1955 social drama about ethics in the medical profession boasts a strong cast who seem at least a decade too old for their roles. This is Stanley Kramer's first film as a director, and his tendency toward preachy high-mindedness is already prevalent in this story of Lucas Marsh, a talented but selfish and arrogant student working his way through medical school. His only friend is his pragmatic roommate, caring cut-up Alfred Boone, though the focus of the plot is really the relationship between Marsh and Swedish nurse Kristina Hedvigson, a near-spinster with a $4,000 savings account (big money in the mid-1950's). Even though she is infatuated with him, Marsh does not reciprocate but still marries her to fund his education. His Machiavellian approach comes to a head when he graduates, becomes a small-town doctor, embarks on some indiscriminate behavior, and faces a failure that finally touches his long-untapped humanity.

All three leads were hovering around forty when they made this film, yet based on their absolutist behavior, the characters feel like they should be in their mid-twenties. In the same year he played the crazed religious fanatic in the classic The Night of the Hunter, Robert Mitchum is oddly miscast as Marsh since he reverts to his standard stoicism when he confronts his periodic crises of conscience. As Boone, Frank Sinatra is relegated to a supporting role who is little more than a plot device. Poor Olivia de Havilland, though top-billed, seems out of place with her male colleagues. As Kristina, she is back in Melanie mode as a selfless victim only coming to life near the end. There is more interesting work on the sidelines. Earlier in the film are effective turns by Broderick Crawford as the gruff medical school professor and Lee Marvin as a more carefree student. Arriving late in the movie, Charles Bickford as Marsh's small-town mentor and Gloria Grahame as a libidinous divorcee also make vivid impressions. With a few shots of surprising realism, the film looks like it inspired every medical TV drama that followed. What doesn't surprise me is that this film, despite its star-heavy cast, has not been transferred to DVD. It is simply that boring and contrived.

Is there a doctor in this movie?
Yeah, lots of them. There's Frank Sinatra, Dr. Boone. A great pal & party animal. He's becoming a doctor because his daddy is a rich one. Not with my kid. There's Lee Marvin, Dr. Brundage, plannig his lucrative career. Patients are a necessary evil to be dealt with. Then there is another aspiring doctor, Lucas Marsh played by Robert Mitchum. He is the best of them plus he's really built. But he is poor & doesn't have enough money to finish med school. Along comes "plain jane" nurse Kristina, played by Olivia de Havilland. She lives with her parents, doesn't get out much & is turning into a spinster. But she has saved her $$$. Lucas romances her, she falls in love & they marry. His $$$ problems are solved & he has a wife he doesn't love. Lucas is a great doctor & I wouldn't mind being his patient. His people skills however, are lacking. He only has time in his life for medicine. As a result he alienates those around him, most notably his wife. He has impossibly high standards that no one can reach including himself. He is not god. Lots of familiar faces including Harry Morgan playing Kris' idiot father, Brodrick Crawford as the principled pathologist & several others.
The most ludicrous and frankly distracting item is the fact that apparently everyone chain smokes. Find a scene where someone is not lighting up. It's a movie about doctors in a hospital & they smoke while in class & while examining patients. The patients smoke while in bed & while being examined. Eventually everyone can stay at the hospital & be treated for lung cancer. I recommend this dated & sometimes unintentionally funny movie.

Lush Ode to the Hippocratic Oath & True Love
"Not as a Stranger" was an unexpected pleasure once I got past the shock of seeing Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, and Lee Marvin (or his twin)as medical students staring down from tiered seating at a lecturing doctor. Oh, my, I thought, that is NOT a town in which to get sick! I was reeling from mis-casting shock for a number of minutes into the movie, but then Hollywood starting luring me into enjoyment of the performances of these actors cast against type. Bob Mitchum, the penniless son of a hopeless alcoholic (a very WELL-cast Lon Chaney, Jr., alas, in a sad role)wants to be a doctor more than any of his fellow colleagues, many of whom dream of big future salaries and big old 50's cars, in order to set the world right. This strikes me as a realistic characteristic of a child of an alcoholic, who's had chaos thrust upon him and wants to put it back in its place. The fact that Bob Mitchum doesn't look like any doctor most folks would imagine actually starts working for him--he does look Proletarian, he does look like someone who's had a rough time heretofore, and he definitely looks like someone with the physical strength to stand up to a doctor's rigorous career demands. Moreover, Frank Sinatra plays the indulged but basically good-hearted son of a rich man who is in med school to score money afterwards convincingly; he WAS a good actor and I came to enjoy his presence in the role. There is A LOT of information in the film about what a good doctor should know and how difficult the job is; done correctly, medical practice is a, don't laugh, noble calling and the film promotes this view. It also, however, acknowledges the presence of greed and mediocrity among medical men and hospital administrators, so there is a sensible balance between ideal and real. Now, as to the true love aspect, Olivia DeHaviland does a wonderful job as the Swedish-American nurse who loves and supports (and I do mean financially as well as emotionally)Bob Mitchum's young doctor. This is another one of those films in which the luminous, beautifully put-together Ms. DeHaviland is supposed to be, cough! cough!, plain--homely, declasse, etc. Yes, her platinum blonde hair is pulled tight enough to break and the make-up is laid on very sparingly, but for heavens sake why did Hollywood think this woman wasn't a raving beauty? I think perhaps the sincerity with which she played gentle women of character and responsibility is partly to blame for her being cast as un-glamorous. It apparently was as hard to reconcile "good" with "sexy" in olden Hollywood as it is now, sigh...Anyway, the nurse sincerely loves her doctor despite her growing awareness that he considers her more of a convenience than anything else, and for me the romantic tension was not so much in the doctor cheating with the horsy rich vavoom girl as in wondering if the fool man would ever realize what he has at home. Watch this beautifully shot, lush, 50's drama and find out. And enjoy all those character actors and actresses, such as Harry Morgan playing a flat-affected Swede with a wonderful poker face.

One of the first of the medical reality movies
Although many of the scenes in this epic would be judged "hokey" by modern standards, "Not As a Stranger" was one of the first films to give viewers a factual look inside the medical profession and challenge the god-like nature of physicians. Mitchum plays a young man with many personal "issues," who tries to work them out by driving himself to become a stellar doctor. Sinatra plays an uncharacteristically "second banana" role as a stalwart physician-friend to Mitchum and DeHavilland. Broderick Crawford is the demanding and idealistic medical school professor who inspires Mitchum, Bickford is the long-suffering and self-sacrificing family doctor whose practice Mitchum joins, and DeHavilland and Grahame are the two women in his life. DeHavilland represents many doctors' wives through the decades, who were chosen as spouses because of the stability and respectability they offered... not because of love. The anguish this causes DeHavilland in the film is poignantly representative of many other real-life women in her position. Gloria Grahame is also another stereotype of the 1950s, playing a rich, bored, depressed widow who acts out on her pain with sexual promiscuity (which is only referenced in a veiled fashion in this movie). In the end, Mitchum fails himself and his friend and mentor, Bickford, by failing to save Bickford's life when he has a medical crisis of his own. The shattering effect this event has on Mitchum is emphasized by the fact that the only person he can turn to in his grief is his wife, DeHavilland, whom he does not love and who does not love him.