Captain Newman, M.D.

Captain Newman, M.D. is set in 1944 at an Army Air Corps hospital in Arizona, where Captain Josiah Newman runs a neuropsychiatric ward for soldiers broken by combat. The military is only beginning to treat psychiatric illness as a genuine medical condition, and Newman has roughly six weeks to return each man to duty or send him elsewhere. His staff is short-handed, so he relies on an inventive corporal, Jake Leibowitz, and a new nurse, Lieutenant Francie Corum, to keep the ward running. Among the patients are a colonel who has cut himself off from his past, a captain left nearly catatonic after months hiding from the enemy, and a young corporal traumatized when his aircraft went down. Newman's superiors want quick results and a return to the front, which puts his medical judgment at odds with the demands of the military.

David Miller directed the film, the sixth in the chronological list of his features, following Lonely Are the Brave. Richard L. Breen wrote the screenplay with Henry and Phoebe Ephron, and Gregory Peck produced alongside Robert Arthur while starring as Newman. Tony Curtis plays Leibowitz, Angie Dickinson plays Corum, and Eddie Albert, James Gregory and Bethel Leslie appear among the large credited cast of thirty-four.

Released at the end of 1963, the film runs 126 minutes and mixes comedy with drama and wartime settings. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.9 from about 3,200 votes, while on TMDB it rates 6.7 from a much smaller pool of 35 votes.