The Carey Treatment was far from Blake Edwards’
favourite among his own films – it was mired in production problems and he
tried unsuccessfully to have his name taken off it. I’ve always liked the movie
a lot though – even if not entirely by the director’s design, it’s so honed
down and clipped in some key respects that it verges on stubborn abstraction. This
quality is evident from the start, as pathologist Peter Carey arrives at a
Boston hospital for a new gig – within minutes he’s tangling with a security
guard, taking the first steps toward a relationship with a female colleague (Jennifer
O’Neill), and overriding the police in their handling of a suspected drug thief,
and when a colleague is accused of killing a young girl through a botched
abortion, Carey takes it upon himself to get to the truth (the police don’t seem
interested in probing further, and there’s no sign of a defense lawyer), which
reveals itself through four or five deductive steps and a lucky chance sighting
of the perpetrator. Carey might be regarded as a kind of inverse Inspector Clouseau,
each moving through a world in which resistance bends to the protagonist’s blind
certainty: for all his provocative attributes though, Carey doesn’t share Clouseau’s
defiance of the laws of science, taking a serious beating which leaves him on
the verge of collapse for the climactic scenes. The prominence of illegal abortion
in the plot (this being a pre-Roe vs. Wade world) certainly deepens the moral
and ethical fabric, although it’s probably unintentional how the notion of
women lacking control over their own bodies finds echoes in the near-absence from
the film of any woman with more than sex on her mind (even by the standards of
under-utilized female leads, O’Neill’s role is fairly pitiful). Overall, for
all its flaws, the film feels personal and preoccupied, navigating between
amusement and disgust.
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