Green Light (1937)

[4]

Errol Flynn stars as a surgeon who takes the fall for an older colleague who accidentally loses a patient under the knife. As fate would have it, he then falls in love with the deceased patient’s daughter (Anita Louise), but when she learns he’s the one blamed for her mother’s death, he flees in self-imposed exile. Searching for new meaning to his life, he risks death to help cure spotted fever at a research facility in Montana.

Green Light begins as a moderately interesting medical drama, but soon nosedives into a series of heavy-handed moral and religious conversations. The film starts to feel like a sermon until the Montana sequence happens. Montana also marks the end of the film’s romantic subplot for a while — making it feel almost like an entirely different movie. Disjointed and ponderous as the film is, Flynn is still good in it. The supporting cast is hit and miss, with Margaret Lindsay making the most of a nurse who carries an unrequited torch for Flynn (can you blame her?). Sir Cedric Hardwicke embodies the film’s spiritual tedium as the preacher who serves as dean for the hospital. With Walter Abel, Henry O’Neill, and Spring Byington.