Made by Harold Lloyd just as he was coming into his own as silent cinema's most popular clown, "Dr. Jack" failed so consistently to engage or entertain that it left me feeling not just perplexed but a bit crestfallen.
Dr. Jackson (Lloyd) is the kind of doctor who gets paid in smiles and old pocket knives while helping those who think they are sick but really just need friendly attention. This includes the Sick- Little-Well-Girl (Mildred Davis), suffering not from any malady but the heavy-handed ministrations of Dr. von Saulsbourg (Eric Mayne), who is less interested in his patient than his paycheck. Does Dr. Jack have the cure for what ails her?
Lloyd and his frequent collaborator, director Fred C. Newmeyer, enjoyed success with their prior two features, which mixed solid stories, involving sentiment, and clever gags. Perhaps the pair thought they simply needed to re-use the same ingredients without worrying too much about the proportions. That's my theory, anyway.
The story kicks off by introducing the benevolent Dr. J and then running him through his paces, which include performing CPR on a dolly with a rolling pin, riding a cow backwards, and helping a boy escape punishment for feigning sickness. Lloyd has a solidly amusing introductory sequence, trying to crank his car and eat his breakfast simultaneously. After that, and some fun stuntwork involving cows and his car, the usual elegant leanness one gets from early Lloyd becomes sorely missed.
Dr. Jack's ministrations include handing out sheet music to a horn- playing invalid and boxing another frail fellow into robust health. People grin like maniacs as he passes by, just so you know he's a swell guy. He fools a businessman into paying a visit to his aged mother, apparently by convincing him the woman's at death's door. As she jumps into his arms and kisses him, Jack grins and sticks out his chin: "You're the medicine – It's you that she needs!"
Even more heavy-handed is the handling of the Sick-Little-Well-Girl story. Dr. von Saulsbourg bans sunlight, flowers, and music from the girl's bedside. At one point, we watch the doctor make a point by pounding his fist on a table, crushing a flower in the process. An iris effect closes in on the crushed flower. We also get many close- ups of a teary Davis. An actress best known for marrying Lloyd, Davis had her moments in the shorts she made with him. Here she never connects as a character, swinging from gravely depressed to hyper-happy.
Calling out any actor for giving less than their best work is unfair here. The gags are thin, repetitive, and labored. The girl meets Dr. Jack at a restaurant ("Chicken Dinner – 30 cents" reads a sign on the wall) where Jack upsets her evil doctor by feeding a dog under the table. A protracted sequence involving an illicit poker game takes us out of the main story before it develops, where the gag involves Jack feeding various players aces in order to break up the game and save one of the players from losing his house. This has nothing to do with the main story, and it's not funny on its own, but it fills time.
It's true that Lloyd frequently employed sentiment, and quite well; better than Chaplin, I think. Usually he knew when to pull back, to employ comedy when things got too emotionally sticky, or conversely, introduce an element of pathos when things got too silly. Perhaps that's one way to look at "Dr. Jack," as Lloyd testing the boundaries of this approach.
It may have worked, too. Even though "Dr. Jack" was a major box- office success, it seemed he never did get as carried away again in his silent period as he did here. Maybe he understood better than his audience what worked; this might account for why so many of his films have stood the test of time far better than "Dr. Jack."
