Undercover Doctor

Having sunk into alcoholism and lost his nurse Margaret Hopkins (Janice Logan), Dr. Bradley Morgan (J. Carrol Naish) happens upon a new kind of medical practice that proves quite lucrative: medical treatment for gangsters. At the beginning of Louis King’s Undercover Doctor, the down-on-his-luck Morgan is awoken one night by gangster Eddie Krator (Broderick Crawford) and forced to extract a bullet from one of his thugs, a procedure for which he’s paid handsomely and which leads to a job offer to serve essentially as doctor in residence for the Krator gang. This new lease on life allows Morgan to relocate to the big city, start up a high-end practice serving the city’s shadiest criminals, and re-hire nurse Margaret, a lifestyle which earns the romantic devotion and matrimonial promise of socialite Cynthia Weld (Heather Angel). When Margaret starts dating FBI agent Robert Anders (Lloyd Nolan), however, the doctor realizes that the Feds are onto him, so turns over some of his patients to the police in order to preserve a law-abiding image, even saving a G-man’s life to widespread acclaim. The metaphorical hammer, however, will come down eventually. While Naish is quite good in one of his rare leading roles, the exciting performances are good guy Nolan battling bad guy Crawford, both early in their careers just as their screen personalities were beginning to shine. Packing a lot of drama and action in just over an hour, Undercover Doctor is based on a novel by legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who, many today might be surprised to learn, wrote and published crime fiction as a hobby.