Released by Twentieth Century Fox, it stars Cary Grant and Jeanne Crain, with supporting performances by Hume Cronyn, Finlay Currie, Walter Slezak and Sidney Blackmer.

It was nominated for the Writers Guild of America screen Award for Best Written American Comedy (Joseph L. Mankiewicz).

Dr. Noah Praetorius is a physician who teaches in a medical school and founded a clinic dedicated to treating patients humanely and holistically.

Meanwhile, student Deborah Higgins enters Praetorius's life, displaying signs of emotional distress.

When he woke up, he was lying on a table in front of Praetorius, who was at that time a medical student examining what he believed was a cadaver.

On August 30, 1951, The New York Times praised the film in a long review, predicting the kind of acclaim received by the producers' previous hit, All About Eve.

“For this merry melange of medicine, mystery and what must be the Mankiewicz philosophical code takes itself seriously but not so seriously as to avoid injecting as many chuckles as possible within the framework of an adult story… Using a script which is as sharp as a scalpel… the scenarist-director is relating the story of a strange, handsome medico a doctor who is not content to diagnose and cure but one who knows there is a vast difference between that concept and his duty which is ‘to make sick people well’….But a synopsis is merely a bare and unflattering skeleton.

"[4] A review at the Films de France website[5] postulates that the movie is a reaction to "Mankiewicz’s own experiences during the McCarthyist Communist witch hunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s, while he was president of the Directors Guild of America (1950-51)".

The review further advanced that the movie deals with many other issues, including the pregnancy of a single woman, the "corrosive effect of unfettered capitalism, the human cost of the Korean war, among others."

The film's score consists of two classical pieces: Johannes Brahms' Academic Festival Overture and Richard Wagner's Prize Song, adapted and conducted by Alfred Newman.