The movie surely isn’t about Elwell, nor, properly speaking, is it about the treatment of actual physical ailments, to which it pays almost no attention. In fact, one of the great pleasures of People Will Talk—showing as part of a complete Mankiewicz retrospective during and after the New York Film Festival—is that it often doesn’t seem to be about any one thing. It’s a digressive, gleefully eccentric film spattered with left-field discourses on, among other subjects, model-train driving, symphony conducting, and farm management, spaced out to make room for solos from a terrific lineup of character actors: Walter Slezak as the dotty Austrian chemist who plays upright bass in the medical school faculty orchestra Noah conducts; Sidney Blackmer as the sheepish, penniless father of the doctor’s young patient-turned-wife Deborah (Jeanne Crain); Will Wright in a cantankerous one-scene turn as Blackmer’s brother, a farmer for whom life’s chief pleasure is the adding up of tax deductions; and, in what might be the film’s strangest element, Finlay Currie as the broad-statured, slow-witted shuffling “friend” of Noah’s who inexplicably clings to the younger man like a shadow....
