Richard Hamilton | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing St. Elsewhere, a medical show which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1988. The show can be found on Hulu and, for purchase, on Prime!

Another day, another death in Boston.

Episode 1.17 “Brothers”

(Dir by Mark Tinker, originally aired on March 15th, 1983)

I swear, St. Eligius must have the worst security guards in Boston.

In this episode, Walter Schaefer (Pat Hingle), a blue collar fisherman, manages to smuggle a freaking hunting rifle into the hospital so that he can use it to kill his brother, Arthur (Richard Hamilton). Arthur was dying of cancer and didn’t have much time left. Walter had previously begged Dr. Westphall to cease giving Arthur chemotherapy and to just let his misery come to an end. Westphall declined to do so so Walter killed his brother. The episode was designed to make the viewer feel that Walter had no choice but …. eh, I don’t know. I’m not a fan of euthanasia and I find the enthusiasm for it in television and film to be a bit icky. This episode’s treatment of the issue was about as heavy-handed as they come. And seriously, couldn’t Walter have just smothered Arthur with a pillow or something? Shooting a man is dramatic but now I’m wondering about who had to clean up the room afterwards. Plus. Arthur was hooked up to a bunch of medical equipment that was probably ruined as well.

(I don’t know, it’s hard for me to judge this storyline. My Dad died in hospice care and I had to sign a DNR order before he could start it. The aggressiveness that those people showed in demanding that I sign the order still haunts me.)

On a lighter note, Ehrlich managed to get another date with Shirley, despite the fact that their previous date ended with Ehrlich drunk and making a fool of himself. Fiscus recommended a nice romantic restaurant. Of course, when Ehrlich couldn’t make the date due to his work as a doctor, Fiscus took Shirley to the restaurant. The end result is that Shirley has a crush on Fiscus and Fiscus needs to find a new place to stay because Ehrlich responded by kicking him out of the apartment.

Speaking of relationships, Dr. White is such a sleaze! He’s separated from his wife so he’s now involved with a nurse. While talking to that nurse on the phone, White was flirting with another nurse. But then, Dr. White happened to see his wife out with another man and decided he had the right to get all jealous. Ugh! What a jerk!

Finally, the episode ended with Nurse Rosenthal on the operating table, about to undergo a mastectomy. This was the subplot that actually got to me, not all of the stuff about Walter murdering his brother. Christina Pickles, who has been such a steady presence during the first season, gave a wonderful performance as Rosenthal tried to keep it together as the day of her surgery approached. This storyline brought tears to my eyes and that’s really all I have to say about it.

This was an uneven episode. The stuff with the brothers didn’t do much for me but, when the episode just focused on the doctors and the nurses, it shined.

Long before he played the long-suffering Mr. Feeney on Boy Meets World, William Daniels made his film debut as another school principal in the 1963 film, Ladybug Ladybug.

In Ladybug Ladybug, Daniels plays Mr. Calkins and he’s got a lot more to worry about than just some unstable student with an unhealthy fixation on a girl that he’s gaslighted into loving him. No, Mr. Calkins has to deal with the very real possibility that a nuclear war might break out at any second. One day, when an imminent nuclear attack warning signal goes off, no one can be sure whether or not it’s real or if it was an accident. However, Mr. Calkins takes no chances. He dismisses school for the day and tells all of the students to go home.

However, there’s a problem. The school is in a rural area and most of the students live several miles away. Because it’s early in the day, there aren’t any school buses running. The children will have to walk home. To make sure that the kids get to safety, they’re divided into groups. A teacher is assigned to each group, tasked with keeping the children calm and making sure they reach their houses.

It’s a long walk and the countryside is deathly quiet. Some of the children talk about what’s going to happen if there really is a war. Others, being too young to understand the seriousness of the situation, treat it all like a game. As each child reaches their house, they have to deal with parents who are more concerned about why their child has come home early than the fact that there might be a war about to break out.

Back at the school, Mr. Calkins and a few remains teachers wait. One teacher tries to clean up her classroom, all the while realizing that there’s a chance that the classroom will never be used again.

And we, the viewers, keep waiting for a bomb to drop or, at the very least, some sort of clarification about what’s really happening. We wait in vain. The film’s ending is harrowing but, at the same time, ambiguous. Is the world ending or are the children going to wake up in the morning and head back to school? It all depends on how you interpret the film’s final few moments.

Of course, by the time we reach that ending, a group of children has already taken cover in a bomb shelter. Unfortunately, their self-appointed leader has decided that there’s not room for all the children, which means that one girl ends up getting kicked out. Wandering around outside, she finds an old refrigerator to hide in. Your heart sinks as you watch her climb in and close the door behind her….

Ladbybug Ladybug is a grim film. At times, it runs the risk of being a bit too grim. The film definitely gets across its point but it’s so relentlessly depressing that it’s a bit difficult to sit through. Of course, Ladybug Ladybug was filmed around the same time as the Cuban Missile Crisis so, for many viewers in 1963, the film was less an allegory and more just a record of the feelings and fears that they had to deal with every single day. Towards the end of the film, when one of the children desperately starts to yell, “Stop! Stop! STOP!,” he was undoubtedly speaking for an entire generation that grew up under the shadow of mutually assured destruction.

Ladybug Ladybug was one of the many nuclear war-themed films to be released in the early 60s. One could easily imagine it as being a companion piece to Fail Safe. While President Henry Fonda is debating whether or not to sacrifice New York, the children are simply trying to get home.