Cinema: A Pill

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The New Interns. Is there a doctor in the house? These days there usually is, and usually he's on the screen. U.S. moviemakers, struck by the popularity of TV programs about physicians and by the international success of some British medicomedies, all too often call in a pill pusher to remedy the money megrims. And the remedy often works. In 1962 The Interns, a patent preparation that cost less than $2,000,000 to manufacture, was one of Columbia's major moneymakers.

The New Interns is a second dose of the same cheap stuff, and it's a good deal harder to swallow than the first. The director of the hospital is a surly surgeon (Telly Savalas) with a tongue like a scalpel, a man whose idea of administration is to scream insults at interns in the presence of patients. The interns, of course, give him ample cause for complaint. One of them (Michael Callan) spends most of his time taking an extracurricular course in anatomy from a student nurse (Barbara Eden). Another (George Segal) keeps wandering out of the hospital in pursuit of the punk who raped his best girl (Inger Stevens). Still another (Dean Jones) finds out he is sterile and drowns his sorrows in drink.

There is, however, some sugar on the pill. The action is feverish and the interns sometimes leave the customers in stitches. But for the most part, the picture is an exploratory operation conducted, alas, without anesthesia.