The Carey Treatment (1972)

Directed by Blake Edwards. Starring James Coburn, Jennifer O’Neill, John Fink, James Hong, Pat Hingle, Dan O’Herlihy, Elizabeth Allen, Skye Aubrey, Alex Dreier, Jennifer Edwards, Michael Blodgett, Regis Toomey. [PG]

Coburn’s pathologist transfers from California to Boston and barely has enough time to start romancing a fellow doc (O’Neill) before he has to defend a colleague (Hong) from accusations of accidental homicide via illegal abortion when a fifteen-year-old girl turns up dead—the daughter of the hospital’s chief surgeon, no less. Based on a story by Michael Crichton (“A Case of Need”, published under the pseudonym of Jeffrey Hudson), the whodunit particulars are convoluted, and the efforts of this amateur P.I. with an M.D. are hard to swallow, but Coburn’s in solid form, and in between the periodic talky passages that don’t go anywhere revealing (including the underwritten relationship between “the hero” and “the girl”), there are several strong scenes of drama and suspense to hold interest. Even though he spends most of the movie behind bars, James Hong gets one of the meatiest roles of his early career here, nicely underplaying his character’s moral controversies as expressions of common sense humanity. The mystery-thriller genre certainly isn’t director Blake Edwards’ specialty, but his direction is adequate, and since the movie was taken out of his hands and heavily re-edited by the studio, it’s hard to blame him for any of the shortcomings anyway. The screenwriters (Harriet Frank Jr., Irving Ravetch, John Black, and possibly others, including Edwards himself) all went credited under the single pseudonym of James P. Bonner.

66/100