Customer Reviews

Doctors Wives [VHS]

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Not as bad as some reviews might suggest, this movie actually will keep your interest. It's amazing that actors like Gene Hackman, Dyan Cannon, Ralph Bellamy and Richard Crenna all appear together. The tone of the movie is clearly influenced by the earlier "Valley of the Dolls." One of the doctors' wives is an unashamed nymphomaniac, another a shrew, another an alcoholic, and yet another a repressed wallflower. You get the idea. Some of the 'mod' elements of the movie will have you in stitches - these scenes had to have been dated even when the movie was made in 1970. Watch for the scene where Richard Crenna's wife seduces him after shooting up morphine followed by a champagne chaser. My favorite moment comes when Gene Hackman's shrewish wife Rachel Roberts finally breaks down and confesses her shocking "secret" to him - I guess we were supposed to be already clued into her secret because she's a golfer. Try not to take this movie seriously and you'll be surprised how many laughs you'll get out of it.

What would you get if you mixed two parts "ER" with two parts "Dynasty"? You might think that you would get something steamy yet emotionally intriguing. Instead, you might end up getting an awful medical melodrama called "Doctors' Wives".

I have never understood why any movie would have its most interesting character killed off in the first fifteen minutes. The one and only excusable circumstance would be if you show that character in a lot of flashbacks. That doesn't happen in this film and it suffers severely.

"Doctors' Wives" has the look and feel of a TV pilot. There really isn't much location shooting to speak of. Most of the film takes place in a hospital or at the characters' homes. The screenplay is much more interested in introducing a lot of characters to you rather than fleshing any of them out. As a movie, it is dull and laughable. As a TV pilot, it showed that it might have eventually become rather interesting. Or then again...maybe not.