Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Very disappointed :(

Boring

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

MGM gave a very stylish treatment to Michael Crichton's novel The Carey Treatment and provided James Coburn with one of his career roles as a pathologist/sleuth.Coburn has good reason to turn amateur detective in his new hospital in Boston. His friend and colleague James Hong has been accused of murder and of performing illegal abortions. In super Catholic Boston in 1972 that was the worst kind of charge you can make.Not only that the deceased is Melissa Torme-March the 15 year old daughter of the hospital head Dan O'Herlihy. O'Herlihy is head of a family where everyone goes into or is expected to go into medicine. His daughter was thought to go to Hong for an illegal abortion which was botched. Remember this was before Roe vs. Wade and there were all kinds of back alley abortion providers. Hong tells us he's feeling that women should control their own bodies and charges only lab fees. Others make big money off it, including some of the deceased's own family members. All hush hush and quite hypocritical, but those were the times.Coburn's training as a pathologist makes him suspect that the young woman wasn't even pregnant, but there were some thefts of narcotics at the hospital that the police are also interested in.Director Blake Edwards did well by his ensemble cast. For a doctor Coburn is hip and groovy as the times and pretty ruthless in pursuit of justice for his friend. Getting a career performance was Michael Blodgett who normally played beautiful surfer types, here he's one murderess masseuse. Skye Aubrey does well as a drug addicted nurse.After forty years The Carey Treatment holds up well and is a painful reminder that women need access to safe and legal abortions as well as a fine medical murder mystery.

Nicely shot around Boston and with a good performance by James Coburn. It's a tale of a humanitarian doctor, James Hong, imprisoned for performing abortions at a time when it was illegal -- just as it appears to be becoming now. The fifteen-year-old daughter of some high muck-a-muck expires during a crude attempt and Hong gets the blame. His friend and colleague, the pathologist Coburn, sets out to discover what really happened. It gets kind of twisted.It's competently directed by Blake Edwards but was evidently sliced and diced by various figures higher up the food chain that Edwards asked for his name to be removed from the credits. The three writers had a similar problem and their names were melded into one name representing a person who does not exist.I'm not sure why people were so embarrassed. I suppose in 1972, when this was released, it may have been too shocking (or not shocking enough) but compared to much recent Hollywood output -- "Sawbones" -- it's a treasure trove.In the course of finding the real culprit, Coburn gets to mouth some radical notions about cutting medical costs and eliminating corruption, but that has nothing to do with the story. In fact -- can I borrow a trope from Raymond Chandler? -- Coburn's outburst stands out like a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake. All doctors in the movies want to clean up the practice of medicine. I doubt that the AMA wants to see docs deprived of one of their three Ford Navigators. The docs in the socialized countries of Europe, like France, are reduced to only one or two Citroens. I'm joking about it but only because the question of medical costs is so much in the air as I write this. Also, I'm jealous. Unless they're old friends, every doctor calls every other doctor "Doctor." I have a PhD and nobody calls me "doctor." And I don't even have ONE Ford Navigator!At any rate, if it's sometimes confusing -- and it is -- it moves at a snappy pace. Coburn is fine as the bullheaded medico who puts friendship before institutional responsibilities. It takes Coburn the entire movie to track down the miscreant, who is not a doc. And at the end, two broken men face each other mano a mano, dripping blood. There's a wild but completely plausible car ride. There are no fireballs and no one's head is wrenched off.You'll probably enjoy it.

**SPOILERS** James Coburn acting more like a hard boiled private dick then a doctor is out to find out who's responsible for the death of 15 year old Karen Randell, Melissa Torme-March. This in order to clear his friend and fellow Boston Memorial Hospital doctor David Tao, James Hong, who it turns out does illegal abortions on the side.Karen just happens to be the daughter of the head doctor of Boston Memorial J.D Randell, Dan O'Herlihy, and later it's discovered to Dr. Carey's surprise that he not only finds out from Dr. Tao that he didn't preform an abortion on Karen but after a police criminal postmortem it's revealed that she wasn't pregnant! The movie has Dr. Carey have a lady friend pretty hospital dietitian Georgia Hightower, Jennifer O'Neill, who by being totally wasted bogs down the story with a useless affair. There's an off-the-wall and ridiculous moment in the film where both Dr. Carey and Georgia are secretly photographer while in bed by Sol Schwade, who made sure that they both would see him. This was put into the film just to have a mindless chase scene that in the end ,with Dr. Carey getting a hold of Schwade's camera and film, doesn't amount to anything worthwhile in the plot.Dr. Carey start to unearth Karen's past and finds through her roommate Lydia, Jennifer Edwards, in the private school that they both attend that Karen fooled around with a lot of guys in and off campus. Karen mostly played around with Lydia's, ex-boyfriend Roger Hudson, Michael Bodgett, who works as a masseuse at the Challahan steam and bath house in downtown Boston. Carey got this information out of Lydia by almost killing her in a wild crazy and almost suicidal ride smashing his car through the city streets and seaside country roads as he gave her a lift back home. At the Callahan Bath House Carey blows his cover by being so abrasive and threatening to Roger, whom he demanded as a masseuse, that Roger almost ran him down some time later when Carey left the place to make a phone call. Recovering from his injuries Carey, barley being able to walk, zeros in on nurse Angela Hlden, Skye Aubrey. Angela is not only Rogers girlfriend but also a junkie who supply's herself and Roger with drugs that she steals from the hospital pharmacy.Carey found out about Angela's criminal activities when she herself was attacked and knifed by a drug-crazed Roger, whom she also did a number on with a broken laboratory jar, in order to shut Angela up about what she and him were up to. Later It's also found out by Dr. Carey that it was Angela who gave Karen that blotched unnecessary and fatal abortion in order to collect $300.00 to pay for her and Roger's drugs. It turned out that the pharmacy was temporarily closed down to the hospital staff due to the pilfering going on there.Dr. Carey recovering from his injuries in a hospital room is then again attacked by the bleeding and drug dependent Roger. Before he could finish Carey off, after slashing his attending nurse, Roger is gunned down by the police in the person of Capt. Person, Pat Hengle. Capt. Person got there just in time to put and end to Roger's drug induced rampage. The most disturbing scene in the movie had nothing to do with the abortions or autopsies but with good guy Dr. Carey injecting Angela with a saline solution putting her into excruciating and unbearable pain in order to make her tell him who's responsible for Karen's death, which it turned out was Angela herself. At the same time Dr. Carey was holding back the only thing that would stop Angela's pain and suffering, until she talked, a syringe of morphine. This was like what you would have expected to see in movies made during WWII with Germans and Japanese mad and sadistic doctors and scientists. Not in a movie about a certified and licensed American doctor, Peter Carey, in a big metropolitan hospital with a Boston police captain, Person, present!

Coburn was interesting as the plain spoken wild card pathologist Peter Carey who enters a new hospital brimming with problems. Right off the bat a fellow practitioner is accused of a crime which he couldn't possibly have committed. Carey must unravel criminal activities within the institution to clear his friend which puts him in the sights of a psychotic killer. So-so thriller/drama.