Captain Newman, M.D.

An Army Air Corps hospital in Arizona, 1944. Captain Josiah Newman runs the neuropsychiatric ward. The place is short of everything and short of staff, and Newman gets hold of what he needs through his resourceful corporal, Leibowitz. The military is only beginning to accept psychiatric injury as real, and Newman usually has six weeks. On the ward are a colonel who has sealed off his own past, a captain nearly catatonic after months hidden in a cellar behind enemy lines, and a twenty-year-old corporal whose aircraft was shot down. Gregory Peck and Tony Curtis carry a film that runs comedy and drama side by side. The uncomfortable question sits at the end of it: a man who recovers is sent back to his unit. Bobby Darin was nominated for an Academy Award for his part in it.