Alias the Doctor (1932) Review - Fast, Goofy Pre-Code Fun

If you are looking for a quick, totally ridiculous slice of 1930s melodrama, Alias the Doctor is absolutely worth an hour of your life today.

People who love fast-paced pre-code movies with zero regard for logic will have a blast with this. But if you need your main characters to have even a shred of common sense, you are probably going to hate it. 🏥

Richard Barthelmess plays Karl, an adopted son who is so incredibly good and hardworking it almost makes you want to roll your eyes. He is studying medicine in Munich and is easily the top of his class.

Meanwhile, his foster brother Stephan (Norman Foster) is a total slacker who prefers beer halls and flirting over studying. There is this one scene in the Munich tavern where the extras are swinging their beer mugs so violently I thought someone was going to get concussed. 🍻

Naturally, Stephan messes up big time and performs a shady, illegal operation on a local girl who ends up dying. To save the family honor, Karl decides to take the blame and goes to prison for three years.

He gets out of prison looking exactly the same, except his hair is combed slightly differently to show he has "suffered." He immediately finds out that Stephan has died, which makes his whole prison sacrifice feel a bit pointless.

But wait, a sick kid in the village needs emergency surgery, and Karl is the only one who can do it. The problem is he has no license anymore because of his criminal record.

So, his foster mother—played by Lucille La Verne with some of the wildest, most intense eye-rolling you will ever see—suggests a totally normal solution. She tells everyone Karl is actually Stephan.

This solves the doctor problem, but it creates a hilarious romantic crisis. Since Karl is now legally "Stephan," he cannot marry Lottie (Marian Marsh), the girl he actually loves, because she is now legally his sister.

The movie treats this legal incest loophole like the ultimate tragedy. Barthelmess does this face where he looks like he is trying to calculate a very difficult math problem in his head. 🤨

The whole thing reminds me of the heavy-handed family drama in The Old Nest, but with more scalpels and sterile gowns. Speaking of the surgery, it is hilarious how they just throw a sheet over a kid and Karl waves his hands around like a magician.

At one point, a nurse holds up a tray of surgical tools that look like they were borrowed from a local dentist's garage sale. Nobody wears masks, and everyone is just breathing directly into the open wounds.

I love how fast this movie moves. It is barely an hour long, so before you can even ask "wait, why didn't he just tell the truth?", the credits are already rolling.

It is definitely not a masterpiece of cinema. But for a lazy afternoon when you want something dramatic but silly, it is kind of perfect.