NUTS!
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: NUTS! is a whimsical documentary, mostly animated,
telling the story of John R. Brinkley, who illegally
claimed to be a medical doctor and who achieved a great
following based on the false claim that he could cure male
sexual impotency by an operation that grafted goat testicle
matter onto the patient testicles. To help publicize his
work he founded a radio station that became on of the most
popular stations in the country. Penny Lane, director of
OUR NIXON, directs a script by Thom Stylinski. The story
is told with panache, often funny and more often is just
strange. This is a true story too weird to make up.
Rating: high +2 (-4 to +4) or 8/10
John Romulus Brinkley was a quack doctor (or self-proclaimed
doctor) whose technique was to transplant goat testicles into men
as a cure for male impotency. He first performed the operation at
the request of a patient complaining of lack of function. When it
appeared to be successful he adopted the procedure as his own and
more and more men requested it. He started practicing the
operation in 1917 in the nearly dead town of Milford, Kansas, but
with the popularity of the operation he opened clinics and
hospitals in multiple states. Famous celebrities are listed as
having the goat gland operation. Buster Keaton, Huey Long, William
Jennings Bryon, and Rudolph Valentino were rumored to be patients
and advocates. As one satisfied customer testifies, "I used to
have a floppy dong, but it ain't floppy no more."
To advertise his medical services--if that is the right word--he
became pioneer of radio and the station he founded became a popular
favorite across the US. Eventually he had the world's most
powerful broadcasting station. Brinkley's story is incredible but
true, a nearly forgotten chapter of United States history. The
story drifts from the medical aspects to the radio entertainment
Brinkley sponsored to legal challenges to the Brinkley empire, and
Brinkley's run for governor of Kansas at a time when the system
really seems to have been rigged against him.
Under the direction of Penny Lane, NUTS! drifts from color to
monochrome. It largely uses animation with hand-drawn art.
Interviews are done in color with testimony by experts like Pope
Brock, author of CHARLATAN. Frequently the visuals are of
contemporary news stories covering the career of Brinkley. Also
there are Brinkley home movies and newsreel and other archive
footage. The script is broken into chapters with exaggerated
dramatic titles like "THE COBRA STRIKES" and "INTO THE FIELDS OF
ELYSIUM." The narrator of the film seems as amused as the audience
is.
Oddly, early in the film the narrative makes the operation seem to
be apparently successful. Toward the end the tone has changed and
it sounds instead that the success rate is what we would have
suspected, very roughly nil. Any successes Brinkley appeared to
have were probably due to a placebo effect. One of the failings of
the film is to regard his medical procedures as neither very
helpful nor very harmful. In fact, people were harmed by not
getting the medical treatment they really needed.
One interviewee says, "I'd call him a psychopath, but I'm not
medically qualified to do so." Somehow medical qualification seems
to be an unimportant matter here. This high-spirited documentary
is never less than fun to watch and frequently quite astonishing.
This is one of the more entertaining documentaries of the year. I
rate NUTS! a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 8/10.
Film Credits:
<
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5236900/combined>
What others are saying:
<
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/nuts_2016/>
Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 2016 Mark R. Leeper
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