The Carey Treatment (1972) slipped through the cracks of Big Screen Boston. It had never come out on VHS in the U.S. and didn't come out on DVD until late 2011, and the claims of Boston locations on the unreliable IMDB couldn't be investigated when I was writing the book. I finally checked it out recently, and it was indeed shot in Greater Boston.
At least it's obscure for a reason: no one liked it and no one wanted to take responsibility for it. According to my handy Motion Picture Guide, director Blake Edwards disowned it, writers Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frankm Jr. and John D.F. Black insisted a pseudonym (James P. Bonner) replace their names in the credits and the book it's based on, A Case of Need, is itself a pseudonymous publication by Michael Crichton. Like Crichton's Coma, a later Boston movie, this is a medical thriller, and it's pretty preposterous, with "cool" West Coast doc Peter Carey (James Coburn) moving to town to work at a big, powerful hospital, and finding all sorts of chicanery and corruption going on at the tightly wound insitution.
Unfortunately, the characters are one-dimensional, if that, from the title character to his undeveloped lover (Jennifer O'Neill) and the various adversaries our hero confronts (hospital honcho Dan O'Herlihy, swaggering cop Pat Hingle among them). The most remarkable thing about Carey might be the central roles for James Hong, so often typecast as a marginalized Asian, and for Michael Blodgett of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
Area locations include Storrow Drive and Soldier's Field Road, the BU Bridge, Commonwealth Avenue and Beacon Hill, with Mass. General most likely being the exterior of Carey's workplace. There is also a sequence that appears to be the North Shore, perhaps Marblehead. Perhaps the most interesting use of locations is in the South End, with the ever-popular Orange Line El appearing as well as several (presumably) Washington Street businesses. It's hard to know whether such places as Finlay's Photo Studio, Lincoln Cafe and Callahan's Gym, all seen in the movie, were real. At one point, the action cuts from the real South End to a studio backlot for a car stunt--so certainly putting up a few fake signs or putting a camera shop in an empty store could have easily been done by the production.
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