The character:	Mary Stevens
The actor:	Kay Francis
The movie:	Mary Stevens, M.D. (1933)

Maybe it’s romantic to think so, but it seems to me that for beliefs or ideas to change, there have to be people who are willing to spill their own blood on the altar of convention. Someone has to starve to death during a hunger strike, or take a lengthy prison sentence filled with abuse, or hold up against the calumnies of an ignorant multitude and its venomous leaders. Mary Stevens does not act with perfect morality or total justification, but there are enough cases where she strikes a blow for women and receives those blows back with dizzying ferocity that we might consider her a kind of martyr. Not least among the batterers lining up for a chance to sock her in the jaw is the movie itself; Stevens, separate from the film, must compete with it as the film itself tries to punish her for breaking the rules.

For much of the film, the primary sin of Mary Stevens is that she has the audacity to study medicine despite being a woman. The movie does not linger on this, because even in 1933 the idea of “woman doctor” was significantly less compelling than “woman has a child out of wedlock.” This subject is the one that I find more gripping because the movie takes Stevens more seriously in this role, and in taking her more seriously it takes itself more seriously. Stevens pairs up with Don Andrews, a fellow fresh-faced medical hopeful, and the two of them set up a clinic together. Andrews is the inferior doctor. Although Stevens takes on pediatrics and Andrews is the one doing surgeries, it’s clear that she has the touch and he does not. Making things worse is Andrews’ caprice, his consistency in taking the easy way out. He gets bored and depressed; he turns to drink. He sees a way to a frittering job working for a corrupt father-in-law; he takes it. Meanwhile, Stevens continues to be more than competent. In one scene, she rescues Andrews from himself by rescuing a patient under the ether. It’s the end of the clinic, for one. It’s the end of any belief Andrews might have in his own capacity to practice medicine. It’s the end of any respect we might have for him. And it’s the end of any belief in masculine superiority which we might ascribe to within the picture. Andrews could not have handled pediatrics, but Stevens can do an operation.

The flaw in Stevens is not in her medical abilities, but in her heart. She has been in love with Andrews since the beginning and, in the way of these martyr types, she believes that she could fix him if she were only given the chance. Here the movie spits on her, and I suppose I can’t blame it for doing so, given that she acts with as little self-regard as Andrews does when he decides to dress for surgery after drinking himself stupid. Knowing he is married and, just maybe, knowing that he is incapable of leaving the wife who grants him the security to be a no-goodnik, she sleeps with him anyway. The child is born abroad, leaving her a way to pretend that she has adopted the little fella. It’s a bleak little movie, and the child, in the end, must die of disease despite her best attempts to save him. The movie has to cheat our hero in order to force the child to contract polio, using a totally strange and unlikely method to get one baby to give it to another. In this comeuppance Stevens wins her greatest glory. The movie, like a Greek god or like Job’s tormentor, must intercede and break all the rules in order to keep her from the triumph which it is so, so easy to imagine her earning.