House, MD -- Dr. Gillespie ripoff?

The Dr. Gillespie movies in the early 1940's were a huge hit, as were the books featuring the character by Max Brand. I stumbled across a couple of the flicks on cable and dove right in because Lionel Barrymore has always been one of my favorite actors.

Dr. G was a world-reknowned diagnostician, a wheelchair bound curmudgeon who tackled (and solved) the toughest medical problems. He had a female and two male assistants, whom he was always pitching against eachother with threats of firing.

Sound familiar? In a subsequent Dr. G movie, one of his assistants was played by a very young Keye Luke, whom you might remember as Caine's teacher/mentor in the TV series Kung Fu. Luke, of Chinese descent, played the character as a true-blue American from Brooklyn (he said he was from that borough almost every line) to make his character more likeable during the early days of the war with Japan.

It's clear that House's creators tied the Sherlock Holmes legend into the old Dr. Gillespie stories. I think they owe Max Brand's estate a few bucks.



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