kidboots Lyle Talbot came to Hollywood after having his own stock company to answer the "we need good stage actors" call and happened to catch the eye of William Wellman who immediately started using him. This film wasn't Wellman directed (it was a Phil Rosen picture) but it did have ravishing Thelma Todd in a rare main role, in fact the title role!!Even though Dr. Cromwell (Talbot) is acquitted of a malpractice suit, his reputation is in tatters with only the gawkers and gossip mongers willing to wait in his clinic all day just for a chance to view him. When a pushy reporter posing as a patient gets Cromwell to open up his heart he feels betrayed and is only too willing when an aviator buddy convinces him to fly to places unknown.Cromwell is the only person to walk away from the crash and into a small Yukon outpost where he tries to keep his identity a secret - in fact the beautiful Klondike (Todd) gives him the idea by commenting that he couldn't be that "killer doctor"!! And how have they been able to get all the up to date mainland news?? That is all through Jim Armstrong (Jason Robards) who before he was stricken down with an unknown disease (the same one that Cromwell had operated on that caused him all that trouble) he was an engineering wizard who has built radios in every room. His father (good old Henry B. Walthall) guesses Cromwell's true identity and begs him to operate on Jim, saying he will accept any outcome.There has to be a villain and the splendid Jason Robards is a great one - initially hiding his surliness under his affliction, he can't hide his "megalomaniac" nature when the operation is a success - but is it?? Jim realises that if he shows how well he is he will lose Klondike, so he decides to stick to his wheelchair (and only walk at night). The thrilling ending features Cromwell, minutes from death at the hands of maniacal Jim - will he be saved with only the radio sound waves to help him???Priscilla Dean who was a huge star in the teens and twenties - she was Universal's biggest female star until the arrival of Laura La Plante - she played the feisty reporter!! Recommended.

JohnHowardReid This film and the serial, "The Mysterious Pilot" (1937), plus a documentary short produced by Lockheed around 1940 are the only movie appearances of Captain Frank Hawks, a daring test pilot who was killed in 1937 when an allegedly safe-as-houses airplane he was piloting, crashed. Would you believe, this movie anticipates this real life event? Early on, the character Hawks plays, dies in a crash. That's a shame because Hawks is not only a fascinating person, he's easily the best actor in this film. True, Lyle Talbot is reasonably competent, Thelma Todd looks good (but is not as charismatic as usual) and there is a great performance by Jason Robards as the afflicted Jim Armstrong. And yes, the original screenplay by Tristram Tupper does have some attention-grabbing twists, while Phil Rosen's fluid direction is considerably more involving than his usual humdrum approach! Available on a very good Alpha DVD.

MartinHafer This is a film from W.T. Lackey Productions--a tiny "Poverty Row" studio that lasted a few years from the early to mid-1930s. And, while it had some relatively big-name stars (Lyle Talbot, Thelma Todd, Gabby Hayes and Henry Walthall among others), it is clearly a rather low-budget film. However, the most obvious cheap attribute of the film aren't the set or acting but the incredibly contrived script....very, very contrived! The dialog is also a bit on the limp side as well. Clearly these guys did not hire Preston Sturges or Ben Hecht to pen this script! It was Tristram Tupper--hardly a household name.The film begins with a doctor on trial for murder (Talbot). It seems he was trying some untested technique on a terminal patient and when the patient died he was blamed for this. However, the jury acquits him but in the court of public opinion he was guilty. Soon his medical license is revoked and he has no idea what to do with his life. On a lark, he agrees to accompany a friend on a record-breaking flight through the Pacific Northwest to Japan. However, the plane is forced down in the Klondike due to weather and the Doctor is stuck there. Fortunately, a guy with the exact same rare and unnamed illness just happens to be there AND he's the fiancé of a woman who the good Doc has fallen for during his recouperation after the plane crash!! He has to decide whether to try this same failed procedure and save her fiancé or do nothing--which is the legal thing to do and which will get him the girl! But, since he's a nice guy he operates. Unfortunately, the operation isn't much of a success--though the guy does survive. And, oddly, soon after this there is a report on the radio that the dead guy's wife from the beginning of the film admitted that she and the Doctor had 'put her husband out of his misery'--though this comes out of the blue and simply isn't true! Wow, has this gotten complicated and hard to believe! What ACTUALLY has happened and which is explained soon after is amazingly tough to believe as well! The ending is ridiculously impossible, but also rather neat in its own twisted way! All in all, a decent time-passer but a film that isn't for one second believable. The actors try their best, but the whole thing really could have used a re-write. Perhaps it didn't because it was a B-movie and the studio simply was trying to quickly churn out products.

rsoonsa Thelma Todd, noted for agreeable performances as comedienne in a good many feature films and shorts, is effective here in an essentially serious dramatic role, acting as linchpin about which a complex life or death decision must be made. A mainstay of the Monogram Pictures catalogue for years, the film was eventually lost, a print being latterly rediscovered as part of a privately owned collection held in southern Arizona, where the sere ambient had caused some nitrate decomposition in addition to other problems. It was, however, for the most part successfully restored and, now a public domain commodity, has been reissued. Opening action takes place in New York City where surgeon Robert Cromwell (Lyle Talbot) is being tried for murder, charged with wilfully causing the death of a patient following a developmental operation to excise an intracranial tumour, a procedure that Doctor Cromwell believes was, in reality, a success, although the state's medical board's opinion differs from his, and additionally with the court's finding of innocence, as it subsequently revokes Cromwell's medical licence due to the incident and its attendant publicity. As means of escaping from his subsequent torment, Cromwell accepts a proposal from his flying instructor, Donald Evans (Frank Hawks), to accompany the pilot through Canadian skies to Japan, but a fresh and drastic difficulty is to be part of Cromwell's lot, as the aircraft slams down in Alaska, killing Evans and leaving the unlucky doctor critically wounded in a frozen wilderness. Rescued by a trapper making his rounds, Cromwell is taken to a close on trading post, Armstrong's, where he delightedly accedes to the ministrations of the post owner's fiancée, "Klondike" (Todd), whose affection is soon gained by this ruggedly handsome surgeon on the lam, to the distinct displeasure of her future husband, wheel chair restricted Jim Armstrong (Jason Robards) himself. Cromwell's agreeable stay at the post is sharply altered because an invalid Armstrong is afflicted, in true Hollywood fashion, with precisely the same disease that indirectly propelled the discredited doctor from the United States, and smitten Klondike and Robert agree that he shall perform an identical operation upon Armstrong to that which led to Robert's loss of honour, a dissection that, if successfully completed, will clearly bring about the end of romance between these newly-minted lovers. Generally considered during the time of its original showings as somewhat above Monogram's routine programmer stock-in-trade, the work for its initial reissue is given proper consideration, a satisfactory print being a result. Notwithstanding this, an Alpha Home Entertainment version is characterized by woefully poor sound quality, much of the dialogue scarcely comprehensible. Both Talbot and Todd are well-established and consistently creative ad libbers, and they play well together here, while the supporting cast is a cut above the standard for most "B" films, with one highlight an appearance of famed aviator Hawks, who during one of his scenes describes in some detail injuries he suffered in a greatly publicized air crash. All in all, then, KLONDIKE must be considered a largely studio-bound potboiler, but remains quite good fun nonetheless.