After watching this I first thought that whoever edited this was just really bad. After reading about this films production history I understood why it ended up like this.The basic story of this one is that a dedicated young doctor is about to be married to a wealthy socialite girl but she's tired of him putting the hospital before her. After this argument he ends up in a sleeping area for docs and kisses a nurse in training. We go through a few patients dying and such and then the nurse herself ends up dying on the table and he and his future fiancé break up. No I'm not laving anything out cause that's pretty much what this film has in it.THe biggest problem this film has is the editing is just terrible...but....it's not the editors fault. The crux of this film involves the student nurse and the doctor played by Clark Gable. At the end of the film when she dies, we don't know what's happened. You will literally be guessing what happened. After this his fiancé leaves him and thats it. I decided to look around online and see if I was losing my mind. Well, turns out the hays code didn't like the mentioning of an "abortion" so that had to be cut out...along with was quite a few other bits to appease them. Abortion you say? Yup. Turns out the mystery in the film is the girl has an affair with the engaged doctor and she gets pregnant, has a back alley abortion where she develops and infection/blood clot and dies. Don't worry, this will only help with you trying to figure this one out. After knowing this you'll see what the Hays Code did to this "average" film.I think if your interested in watching this you'd better be a Gable or Loy fan cause other than that, it's not really gonna impress you or anyone to much.

Given all the hoopla against the film (due to it's abortion theme) it is funny to note that the film was produced by Cosmopolitan Pictures - the production company run by William Randolph Hearst out of MGM. Perhaps he was one of the few figures in Hollywood that could (at that date) afford to buck the system for this type of story.Sidney Kingsley's play MAN IN WHITE won the Pulitzer Prize for best play of 1933, and made a Broadway star of J. Edward Bromberg, who played Dr. Hochberg. Some of the issues of the story are toned down in the film. Hochberg like his old friend Dr. Levine (Otto Kruger) are Jewish, and there are traces of anti-Semitism by some of the non-Jewish doctors towards them. But the basic flow of the story, about dedication to serving humanity at all personal cost is maintained.Gabel is engaged to Myrna Loy, and they plan to wed and go to Vienna (he is spending a year there with a specialist as his teacher). But Loy is a wealthy woman who can't understand the round-the-clock demands the medical profession push on her fiancé. Jean Hersholt is Hochberg, and he has great expectations for Gabel (Dr. Ferguson in the movie) as his student and lab assistant. He tries several times to explain the situation to Loy, but he gets nowhere.Loy finally fights back and starts cutting Gabel out of her social life if he misses promised dates. This sets Gabel up for a brief fling with a nurse who worked on a case with him (Elizabeth Allen), who subsequently is rushed to the hospital in an emergency regarding aborting her child by Gabel. That is the crisis of the plot - will Loy dump him or forgive him? Actually the film is still quite effective, as hospitals have become such a common subject since Kingsley's play made it such. The film also offers an interesting comparison regarding Myrna Loy. She was a supporting actress in John Ford's ARROWSMITH in this period, opposite Ronald Colman and Helen Hayes. She was a wealthy woman who loves Colman, but gradually loses him to his desire to be a research doctor. The issue is better examined and explained in MEN IN WHITE.

First, I MUST mention that I LOVE Clark Gable and Myrna Loy flicks and I adore the films of Hollywood's Golden Age. So, my mediocre review is not the result of some prejudice against the actors or type of film being produced at the time. The problem is that the story is just too earnest and preachy to be of much interest. Sure, we can see that Gable is a dedicated young doctor and a heck of a guy--but so what? Most will probably find the film boring and hokey at times. Those who are real film buffs will probably be able to look past this, though most teens and the cynical will want to avoid this film. That's because these viewers MIGHT tend to discount older films or these great actors based only on this turgid experience.

After films like "Convention City" stirred a growing uproar by groups like the Legion of Decency, the Hays Production Code swiftly shut a tight lid on controversial subjects. "Men in White" is very much a pre-Code film - a grimly realistic "slice of life" circa 1934.Sandwiched between his tough gangster roles in "Baby Face," "A Free Soul", and the macho-romantic roles he later specialized in (as in "It Happened One Night" and "Gone With the Wind"), this is one of Clark Gable's best performances. Underplayed wonderfully, Gable plays a moody doctor torn between marrying up, and his desire to further medicine and save lives.This is one of several pairings Gable had with Myrna Loy; in "Wife vs. Secretary," "Manhattan Melodrama," and "Men in White," their romances are compulsively watchable, but obviously headed for turbulence. You could boil it down to tension between his brusque, "salt of the earth" masculinity, and Loy's caring, but slightly petulant "uptown girl" persona. If the "Gable" type and the "Loy" type in these films made a "go of it", it would not be a marriage made in heaven... That's telegraphed from the first reel. But it is fun to watch.If you enjoy watching Loy as a witty, knowing wife in "The Thin Man" series, or frothy screwballs like "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House," you'll probably dislike her one-note, high-maintenance character here. As another reviewer said, she's nothing like Nora in this picture.The story and characters are not especially like "ER", which focused on emergency medicine. "Men in White" is more similar to the modern "Gray's Anatomy," or "St. Elsewhere." In all three story lines, young interns (and student nurses) find themselves at a crossroads, struggling to balance their professional ambitions with personal needs. "St. Elsewhere" also introduced us to older physicians with feet of clay, struggling to save their beloved hospital from budget cuts. Sure, those two descriptions cover some of the characters on "ER" - and on plenty of other films or TV shows without a medical setting... but "Men in White" is special for what it implies about the early 1930s, a time when the medical profession was neither resented or put on a pedestal, but simply portrayed as a special calling.This is also a time before soap operas and romantic films used "Doctor" as shorthand for "good catch". The hospital in question here runs a deficit, led in spirit by the research-oriented Dr. Hochberg (played, fittingly, by Jean Hersholt, one of Hollywood's most famous philanthropists). Hochberg's work is his life; he is an idealist who can barely imagine that a young doctor would not want to follow the same path. Another older doctor talks longingly of the dramatic changes that have occurred in his career, such as the introduction of hygiene methods - "sterilized" masks, coats and gloves were still pretty new. And there's a short scene where a hospital administrator blithely suggests that laboratory technicians should be fired to make more money. (Today, of course, lab costs are a money maker for some hospitals.) All in all, worlds away from "white lab coat" syndrome, bottom-line focused HMOs, and other modern problems of today's hospitals. SPOILER What makes this a pre-Code film, and likely prevented it from gaining more modern viewers or distribution, is a delicately played trio of scenes. One of the characters has had a back-alley abortion, and is rushed into surgery. The word "abortion" is never said, but 1930s viewers were on the level.