Dr. Cook's Garden (1971)

Bing Crosby Productions made a number of what used to be called "thumbsuckers," movies with a philosophical context (not necessarily "message movies," although some of them were).Dr. Cook's Garden is one of those and stars Bing Crosby himself. It features Frank Converse as Jimmy Tennyson, a young doctor going back to his roots in a quaint New England town. Naturally, he visits the town doctor, Dr. Leonard Cook, played by Crosby in one of his better, certainly darker, portrayals.During his visit, Dr. Tennyson notices people dropping dead who didn't seem to have a life-threatening condition... except they often weren't nice to know or particularly decent people. There also seems to have been an unusually sharp distribution between the healthy, thriving population of the town and some sickly kids and adults who die sooner than Tennyson would have predicted.His curiosity piqued, Tennyson noses around Cook's clinic. In the dispensary, where drugs and other supplies for the clinic are kept, he notices an unusually large variety and number of poisons... and Dr. Cook knows that Tennyson noticed.Suddenly. Tennyson begins having close calls, then, in a climactic picnic (just Tennyson and Cook in a bucolic meadow), the two men have it out. Tennyson has a sandwich with a strong mustard which conceals a dose of cyanide, and when it begins to take effect, Dr. Cook reveals his secret and offers Tennyson a chance not to die if he accepts Cook's method of keeping his little town decent. Tennyson accepts, Cook gives him an antidote for the poison, and a tense relationship ensues, neither man trusting the other.Eventually Cook himself has a heart attack; Tennyson has the nitroglycerin pills that CAN save Cook... who realizes he's about to be the latest weed pruned from Dr. Cook's Garden.Crosby gives this character a calm but very dark nonchalance about the deaths he inflicts; it's a side of Bing Crosby I'd never seen back in 1971 when I first saw this film.While Bing Crosby did produce "message movies" for TV, this isn't one of them. No easy answers are in the plot, and certainly nothing that smacks of Crosby's strong Catholic belief in real life. It's a very quiet, unassuming character study, and a mystery good enough to have been in the running for an Edgar Award.I can recommend this, if you can find it. It's unusually thought- provoking for a Bing Crosby Production, worthy of that time in the history of television when at least some producers were smarting from FCC commissioner Newton Minow's judgment of television as a "wasteland," and trying to make worthwhile scripts. Watch it, you won't regret it.

A very popular series of the time was 'Marcus Welby' where the all wise, all knowing doctor educated his patients out of their pride, prejudice, and folly in resisting his counsel. The doctor is wise. The doctor is all knowing. The doctor is only here to help. 1971, and indeed, the era of the Warren Court represented a high water mark of the notion that we can have a perfect society if we just turn loose experts and therapists guided by the social sciences on our problems. The intelligentsia then were absolutely certain of the ability of the social sciences to rehabilitate all criminals, to end poverty, to end racial inequality, to make a perfect land. All we had to do was use the tools of the social sciences to fix the 'root causes'.This film was a marvelous criticism of that zeitgeist. Dr Cook is the ultimate therapist. He is only there to help.

I'm sure that this was not intended to be Bing Crosby's swan song to feature films, but that's what it turned out to be.Crosby is cast against type here. He's the kindly old country doctor in this story who lives and practices in a Norman Rockwell like small town. But Crosby is the town's terrible secret. Unbeknownst to the residents, old Doctor Cook has been euthanizing those he feels have no positive contribution to make. The old mostly, but even younger ones like a crippled child whose medical bills are breaking his parent's finances. A young colleague, Frank Converse, discovers what he's doing and the rest you have to see for yourself.It's an interesting vehicle for a man who was known as THE Catholic entertainer. And it has Bing's one and only screen death in his career. Solid acting by Bing and the cast.

One of the amazing films of the ABC Tuesday Night at the Movies, Bing Crosby starts out as a Kervorkian style doctor but crosses the line as he begins to make judgments on who in his small town must live or die based on their conduct. Chilling and foretelling.