As Dr Edward Erin, the so-called “poisoning doctor” awaits sentencing, he’d better pray that those who are deciding his fate are not in the slightest bit cine-literate. For the movies, to be blunt, hate doctors. Despite a few oddball aberrations — say Robin Williams hamming it up in the zany Patch Adams, or Michael Caine choking back the tears as the avuncular abortionist in The Cider House Rules — movies mostly portray doctors as power-tripping philanderers with homicidal tendencies.

From Boris Karloff as the demented anesthesiologist Dr Thomas Bolton, jacked up on nitrous oxide and cutting a savage swathe through 19th-century London in Corridors of Blood (1958), to the smooth-talking but ultimately murderous chief of surgery Richard Widmark in Coma (1978), right through to Gene Hackman’s ruthless experimentalist in Extreme Measures (1996), the villainous doctor is as elemental to movie genres as the close-up or the fade to black.

And yet, for observers of the Erin case (philandering doctor attempts to poison his pregnant secretary), it is particularly chilling to see just how sweetly it dovetails with the schlocky 1993 Hollywood thriller, Malice. That movie’s villain is a hotshot Boston doctor called Jed Hill, played with a brute ophidian relish by Alec Baldwin.

Jed is an über-surgeon who wears expensive suits and a slick Wall Street haircut to work, who speaks in an intimidating whisper, and who seduces wide-eyed female colleagues on a nightly basis. Unfortunately, Jed also cruelly and unilaterally removes the ovaries of his lover Tracy Safian (Nicole Kidman) while she’s on the operating table, thereby inducing a shock abortion and landing an indignant Jed in court.

However, Baldwin’s Jed avoids a prison sentence and instead gets to chew some career-high lines. “You ask me if I have a god complex?” he says, positively growling from the witness box. “Let me tell you something. I am God!”

Jed, nontheless, is redeemed and reformed in the film’s final shots, but is shot by Tracy (who is revealed to be con woman). It’s a noble end for one doctor. But nothing like reality.

Kevin Maher

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