Marcus Welby, M.D. (TV Series) I Can Hardly Tell You Apart (1971) User Reviews

Ah, the 70's angst and drama!

[bj_bassett · 3/10 · 18 September 2022]

Sally Field plays identical twins - one has terrible resentment about having a twin and acts out badly after the other has an accident with fire and needs skin grafts which only her messed up twin can provide.

Lots of drama (drunk driving scenes, sister with issues paints only "double exposure" paintings, imagined death scenes). Dr. Kiley takes a class on twins and knows all after.

Of course, the twin does right in the end and all is right with the world.

While I'm sure Sally Field loved the role that had many dimensions, looking back 50 years later it's really amazing how far we've come in medicine and in television drama.

"Sometimes, the things you don't do are more significant than the things you do do..."

[moonspinner55 · 3/10 · 22 September 2022]

In the white picket fence world of Marcus Welby, Sally Field guest stars as a party-giver--drinking and distracted while playing "Thoroughly Modern Millie" on the stereo--whose long evening dress catches fire as she's trying to start the barbeque (luckily, she's attended to in the burn treatment room by Russell Johnson, the Professor from "Gilligan's Island"). Season 3-Episode 4 of the long-running series was directed by Leo Penn and also features Jeane Byron (mother to Patty Lane, one-half of the identical cousins on "The Patty Duke Show") while offering a dual role for Field as twin sisters! For avid TV watchers, this is like hitting the jackpot. The crux of the plot is that the two Sallys are estranged, with one needed to provide skin grafts for the other. Field doesn't appear to have a hold on her role(s); she's directed indifferently as the bitter sister, while her burn patient is unceremoniously shot from her chin and nostrils up. Obviously, Penn's job was to keep things simple and make running-down-the-hallway shots as exciting as possible, but the visual asides are a textbook of TV clichés: numerous close-ups of a clock underscored with ominous music, the beeping of a monitor in the patient's room, masked doctors handing each other scissors, etc. Penn does a dizzying pan at one point from patient to her team of doctors that enlivens the narrative for about four seconds; otherwise, the episode feels so rote that one cannot watch without contemplating whether or not the actors are present only for a paycheck or were perhaps grateful for their employment.