The Strange Case of Doctor Rx

Plot summary

Private investigator Jerry Church (Knowles) has just married his longtime fiance, Kit (Gwynne). Defense attorney Dudley Crispin (Hinds) and Church's former police partner Capt. Hurd (Edmund McDonald), talk Church into taking one last case: investigating a string of murders committed by someone calling themself Dr. Rx where the victims have been five clients that Crispin had successfully defended in court.

After a sixth murder and the discovery that another detective has gone insane investigating the murders, Church agrees to drop the case at Kit's insistence. However, he is kidnapped and blackmailed into continuing the investigation by a criminal who the police suspect is the killer but who wants his name cleared by Church finding the real Dr. Rx.

Church is then abducted by Dr. Rx who explains that he is going to transplant Church's brain into a gorilla (Corrigan) to make the gorilla smart, leaving Church in the cage with the angry gorilla. Church is found the next morning and taken, unconscious, to the hospital where everyone gathers around, including Dr. Fish (Atwill) who has been seen following Church. When the District Attorney (William Gould) asks to use Crispin's pen, Crispin takes the pen, which is actually a poison dart gun, and shoots himself in the chest and dies. Church reveals that he has just been faking unconsciousness, and that he had been working with Dr. Fish to capture Crispin who had wanted to prove himself brilliant by defending criminals in court, but then reestablishing justice by killing the guilty men after their trials.

Production and distribution

The film began shooting on October 6, 1941. The script had not been completed and so many of the scenes were ad-libbed. Anne Gwynne reported that making the film was "fun, fun, fun" but that the ad-libbing had left "some plot loopholes in the finished product."

In one of the scenes, the doctor is going to attempt to transplant the police inspector's brain into a gorilla, played by Corrigan. The Strange Case of Doctor Rx was one of the many films in which Corrigan played a gorilla, wearing a customized gorilla suit that he owned. Corrigan, in his gorilla suit, and Gwynne in her nightgown, posed together for promotional stills, although they never appear together in a scene in the film.

The Strange Case of Doctor Rx was one of the 52 Universal films that Screen Gems released in 1956 for television distribution under the Shock! label. It also aired as part of WOR-TV's Science Fiction Theater on January 1, 1972.

Reception

Variety called it "incredulous and wearisome tale" and wondered how it had gotten approval from Universal. The New York Times review said the film was a "collection of babble clues, butlers at windows and gloomy manses, mysterious messages, stupid policemen, leers by Lionel Atwill and matrimonial badinage ... most of which is beside the point." The Leonard Maltin Classic Movie Guide calls the film "fast-paced whodunit" but "not particularly puzzling." Tom Weaver, Micheal and John Brunas appreciated the on-screen chemistry between Gwynne and Knowles, but thought that Atwill, "in the reddest of red herring roles", was wasted.

The film contains racial stereotyping including the type that Robin Means Coleman calls the "coon who turned coward" when Horatio Washington, a black chauffeur played by Mantan Moreland, gets scared and his hair turns white with fright. Weaver, Brunas and Brunas believe that Moreland was able to rise above the racism and provide some genuinely funny lines in his role; while they felt that all of the bumbling cop routine of Shemp Howard fell flat.