StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

HotToastyRag I've always berated the Academy for the 1955 Oscars. Ernest Borgnine won Best Actor over James Dean in East of Eden, Frank Sinatra in The Man with the Golden Arm, and James Cagney in Love Me or Leave Me—and Robert Mitchum wasn't even nominated for The Night of the Hunter! And that's just the Best Actor category; I have more complaints. Now there's another complaint to add to the list of omissions: Not as a Stranger was the best performance of Robert Mitchum's career, and it's a crime he wasn't nominated.Robert Mitchum is a dedicated, but poor, medical student. More than anything else in the world, he wants to be a good doctor; this drives his entire character. He challenges his professors, tells his fellow students they make him sick when they don't take their studies seriously, and proves he'll do anything to achieve his goal. He's very poor and is faced with a dropped enrollment unless he can pay his tuition, and after applying for loans, taking on extra work, and borrowing from his friends, he still doesn't have enough. Olivia de Havilland is a kind, Swedish nurse in love with Bob, and when she learns his plight, she tells him about her nest egg. In order to stay in school, Bob considers marrying Olivia for her money. His best friend and fellow medical student, Frank Sinatra, is disgusted with Bob's choice to take advantage of an old maid's money and love.While the plot is reason enough to watch this fascinating movie, there's so much more to it than Edward and Edna Anhalt's extremely well-written script. Not as a Stranger was a groundbreaking medical film. It discussed medical illnesses and procedures, as well as doctors' responsibilities in unprecedented frankness. "Doctors are the only group in modern society privileged to commit murder with immunity from the law." Statements like that weren't made in 1955, and I'd argue that the public's revere of the medical establishment hasn't wavered through the decades, so you'll be hard pressed to find a modern movie that would utter such a line. Also, this film shows a real open heart surgery—groundbreaking in the 1950s! Bob Mitchum gives an incredible, and rarely vulnerable, performance. Virtually his entire career was comprised of macho, touch roles. There's a scene in Not as a Stranger where a broken-hearted Bob puts his head in his hands and sobs. In another scene, a tight close-up shows his reaction as his world crashes around him; the camera doesn't cut away as we see tears slowly appear and fall. It's incredible that he was capable of such acting, and that he'd allow the camera to capture such vulnerability.Olivia and Frank also give great performances, balancing the different nuances of their characters and showing the audience real, three-dimensional people instead of stock sidekicks. Although Frank is depicted as a rich playboy, he feels compassion and humiliation when mistakes are made. Olivia is more than just an old maid; she's frightened, careful, and aware.Charles Bickford, Gloria Grahame, Harry Morgan, Lee Marvin, and Broderick Crawford add to the supporting cast in this tense, extremely well-written drama. This film was Stanley Kubrick's directorial debut, but it doesn't feel like a newcomer's film. The shots are framed well and with purpose, and he obviously handled his actors beautifully, since they all give great performances. I can't recommend this movie enough; it's one of the greatest classic dramas.

lettadonald Everyone, with the exception of Gloria Grahame was ten years too old to portray these characters with any believability. Beside poor casting, the story itself, was not the most entertaining to turn into a film. IMHO a huge goof. Surely, in 1955 there were many young actors who could have rendered these lines with more verve and conviction...and with actual blonde hair, even though there are many Swedish people with dark hair. A better cast might have included Lee Remick, Aldo Ray, Dean Stockwell, James Dean, Ann Bancroft, Russ Tamblyn, Bradford Dillman, Natalie Wood, and (or) Chris Robertson. Any combination of these performers might have given this film the fresh and contemporary feel it desperately needed.

Karl Ericsson I'm a general practitioner and I can tell that this kind of doctoring regretfully does not exist anymore. I do not mean the business with the mole which, of course by what we know now, was wrong. I mean that these guys were really general practitioners who did almost everything, leaving almost nothing to specialists.But that's not really why this movie is good. The character that Mitchum plays is a complicated one but still his motive is to be somebody that matters in this world, to be a genuinely worthy doctor. He doesn't lack heart but he lacks tolerance.The reason I like this film is however that it describes people who truly care. Tolerance has a danger to slip into permissiveness, especially concerning power and that has happened too much today. With all it's shortcomings, and there are indeed some, the times that are displayed here still were a lot more decent than what we have today and what makes this film especially precious is that you can see the embryo of more evil times to follow if you are attentive enough.A film to learn from in many ways.

imogensara_smith With a cast including Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, Broderick Crawford, Lee Marvin and Gloria Grahame, you'd expect hard-boiled crime drama. If so, you might want your money back after seeing NOT AS A STRANGER. One Hollywood wag remarked of the Mitchum-Sinatra-Crawford-Marvin lineup, "That's not a cast, that's a brewery!" and the actors lived up to their rowdy reputations, turning the shooting into "ten weeks of hell" for director Stanley Kramer. Mitchum described Crawford swallowing Sinatra's hairpiece with a vodka chaser (Of course, you never know when Mitchum is putting you on. But I like to believe he did call up Sinatra in Palm Springs to say, "Guess what? The Crawdad just drank your wig.") Sinatra took to calling Mitchum "mother" after he nursed Ol' Blue Eyes through a hangover. It's too bad Kramer didn't film these on-set antics; the footage would have been more entertaining than the plodding and earnest medical melodrama he did produce.The casting is spectacularly misguided; for a start, everyone is almost twenty years too old. The film opens with the 40-ish Mitchum, Sinatra and Marvin as medical students observing a dissection, and right away credibility is strained. (If I walked into a doctor's office and saw Lee Marvin in a white coat, I would run.) And whose idea was it to cast the famously jaded, take-it-or-leave-it Mitchum as the rigid, idealistic, driven hero? Only top-billed Olivia de Havilland seems to belong in this type of movie, and she suffers from a platinum dye job and a mediocre Garbo accent. I waited more than an hour for Gloria Grahame to show up, and then she was wasted on a throwaway subplot that's over almost before it begins.No cast could have made the movie much good. It's overlong, and the script is both obvious and underwritten; a few minutes into every scene I could predict what was going to happen by the end, and I foresaw the final plot twist about halfway through the film. The first half follows Lucas Marsh (Robert Mitchum) through medical school. For reasons never entirely clear he is obsessed with becoming a doctor, though his father (who drank up all the money his mother left to pay his tuition) tells him, "I don't think you'll make it. It's not enough to have a brain, you have to have a heart." Thus in the third scene we get the message of the movie, and have a pretty good idea of everything that will follow. Desperate for money to stay in school, Luke woos and marries Kristina (Olivia de Havilland), a frumpy Swedish nurse who—for reasons never entirely clear—is madly in love with him. (We know because she keeps telling him, "I love you SO MUCH!") It's made abundantly clear that Luke is brilliant and noble-minded—he despises the other students who just want to make a lot of money—but arrogant and intolerant of human frailty. In his first practice, assisting a kindly and intelligent small-town doctor (Charles Bickford) he does a wonderful job, but his marriage disintegrates as he falls for a seductive wealthy widow and his wife can't bring herself to tell him she's pregnant. You just know that sooner or later he's going to falter at the operating table and be shattered by the realization that He Too is Only Human.To this oppressive script, add heavy-handed direction that hammers each point home with obvious symbolism and simplistic montages (and a few--but not enough--moments of unintentional hilarity like the whinnying stallion underscoring the first big Mitchum-Grahame clinch), and the most relentlessly overwrought music I've ever heard. No one except Sinatra, playing the only light-hearted role, manages to crawl out from under the lead blanket of this movie. My admiration for Robert Mitchum knows no bounds, and I wouldn't say he's bad here, but he's certainly been better. It's not that he's incapable of playing characters who care deeply or zealously pursue a goal (See HEAVEN KNOWS, MR. ALLISON or NIGHT OF THE HUNTER.) The problem is that Lucas Marsh is humorless, uptight and self-righteous, devoid of that perceptive, ironic, compassionate distance that's essential to Mitchum. Marsh is hot tempered, intolerant of others and blind to his own flaws—in other words, it's a Kirk Douglas part. Kirk would have been perfect, but Mitchum never really connects with the character. Maybe it just didn't seem worthwhile: Mitchum never gave more to a movie than it deserved. He does have some nice moments: the encounter with his pathetic father gives some explanation for why he's so disgusted by weakness; he plays well with Sinatra, strikes some sparks with Gloria Grahame, and excellently delineates Luke's feelings for his wife, a mix of boredom, admiration and guilt. He's pretty convincing in the doctoring scenes (there are way too many of these, at least for someone like me who gets woozy at the sight of a hypodermic needle.) But he seems a little bored most of the time, not that I blame him. Maybe I should have taken my cue from the actors and had a few drinks on hand.