Medic (TV Series) My Brother Joe (1954) User Reviews

It's Not Ozzie and Harriet

[dougdoepke · 2 January 2016]

Ten-year old Joe Lockwood is critically injured in a car accident with his father driving. Now in the hospital under intensive care for head trauma, Joe's dysfunctional family gathers. Older brother Stanley goes in immediately to see Joe, but Dad (Greenway) and Mom (Thayer), now living separate lives, don't. Instead, each has an excuse for staying in the waiting room. The impression is that Dad's weak and possibly a drinker, while Mom is self-centered and detached. Clearly, brother Stanley is the adult in the family. It's their revealing interactions that comprise the story's backbone, with medical breakaways updating efforts to save the boy.

All in all, it's a rather elegiac episode, definitely a contrast to the idealized family of 50's TV. Frankly, the acting is rather spotty-- Dimond has a lengthy unedited speech recriminating his emotionally detached parents. Likely, the main attraction now is a young Charles Bronson (Dr. Bircher), just then getting on-screen credits. I recall from that period my mom and I commenting on his distinctive looks—someone you would remember. Also-- Lorna Thayer later played the prickly waitress who takes no lip from Jack Nicholson in the famous chicken- sandwich scene from Five Easy Pieces (1969). Here we get a taste of her prickly abilities as Joe's mom.

All in all, this is not exactly a comforting episode from that often challenging series.

Deadly dull

[lor_ · 14 October 2023]

This episode of "Medic", viewed so many decades later, tarnishes my fond childhood memory of the show. It's a mistake on the lake, playing like a PSA (final line spoken by star Charles Bronson to a fellow doctor is "Drive safely") and lacks even the camp quality of those '50s government-produced short documentaries about civics, like how to handle jury duty.

Bronson is stuck in a nothing lead role as a neurosurgeon with a 10-year old boy, an accident victim of a car crash. Many of the cast members are real doctors, not actors, and the soul of the episode is entrusted to teen actor Jack Diamond, a guy destined to play bit parts. Jack underplays so much he seems like a portrayal of a robot, until his big self-righteous scene of reading the riot act to his self-centered divorced parents, and proving only that he can cry on cue.

This 50/50 mashup of documentary style real medical procedures with unwatchable sentimental morbidness is a case study in how not to dramatize "real life". And I am a big fan of director Bernard Girard, who made this clunker -ouch!