Latest video: Doctor Feelgood

By Ewan McDonald

He got his big break when he auditioned for the part of Mork the Ork, the alien who dropped to Earth and shared a house with drippy Pam Dawber (whatever happened to ...) in the 70s sitcom Mork and Mindy.

When the show's creator, Gary Marshall, told Robin Williams to sit down, he sat on his head on the chair. "I had to hire him," Marshall said later, "he was the only alien who auditioned."

During the making of Mork and Mindy Williams departed from his lines so often and so well that the producers stopped trying to make him stick to the script. They deliberately left gaps in them, writing "Mork can go off here" so Williams could improvise.

Aaah, that was when Robin Williams was funny. Perhaps that's unfair: he still is, but these days it seems to be confined to talk-show appearances where he gives free rein to wild, stream-of-consciousness dialogue, cultural references, impersonations, one-liners.

You can pick the moment when his movies became too Serious, too Meaningful, too Emotional. It was about halfway through Good Morn-ing Vietnam when someone told him to be Serious, Meaningful, Emotional.

Williams' new offering in video stores is Patch Adams, based on the story of American doctor Hunter Adams. It starts with Williams as a sucidal Adams, checking-in at a psychiatric hospital. Here he finds that the doctors don't help him but the patients do.

When he leaves he decides to study medicine in order to help people, So he enrols in medical school. He is surprised to find that medicine is an impersonal business. He decides that humour is the best medicine. He tries it out on the patients.

(You will notice that this is written in very short sentences. This is because this movie likes to spell things out very simply. And obviously.)

Here are some examples of our med student's bedside manner: put in charge of the welcoming committee for a gynaecologists' con-vention, he builds a papier-mache prop of enormous spread legs at the lecture hall entrance; a dying woman refuses to eat so he persuades her to take nourishment by filling a plastic wading pool with pasta and jumping around in it; he puts on a red nose and entertains the kids, and some adults, from the chemotherapy unit in his spare time. Oooh boy, if I'm ever in there and some guy comes in cracking jokes ...

By his third year Patch/Williams has fallen in love with a fellow student who is destined to become a plot device, come up with plans for a "fun hospital ... the Gesund-heit Institute" on 100 acres in the mountains, and fallen so foul of his professors that the only way to resolve this movie is another plot device: The Trial. With the big Serious, Meaningful, Emotional speech. Oh, and the chemo-kids.

Yes, I know there will be phone calls from people telling me this is a true story and I'm an old grump who doesn't like a nice movie with a happy ending. Hey, I was the guy who praised good family movies just a couple of weeks ago; and I'd recommend that anyone who believes this is a faithful account of Hunter Adams' life and work should check out just how much valuable work the Gesundheit Institute has done (answer, not quite what is made out here).

And I really like Robin Williams. He probably is the funniest man alive, as Entertainment Weekly says. But he should stick to the nit-witting and break out of the parade of maudlin tosh, get back on the edgy.

Somehow I can't see it coming with his next big-screen offering. Jakob the Liar is about a poor Jewish cafe-owner in Poland who fears what's about to happen when the Soviets begin to turn the Nazis back. So he starts an underground radio station and begins broad-casting funny, misleading information to the ghetto to reassure his fellow Jews and mislead the Ger-mans. Soon the Nazis come for Jakob.

Is this sounding like Good Morn-ing Warsaw, Life is Beautiful?

\EE Best of the others around this week is Polish Wedding, a comedy with Claire Danes (Romeo and Juliet, Little Women) as Hala, who falls for the neighbourhood cop, to the irritation of her sassy mother (Lena Olin, The Unbearable Light-ness of Being) and sensitive father (Gabriel Byrne). Now a wedding is planned - despite an upset family and extremely reluctant groom ... Class cast for A Destiny of Her Own, a costume drama with Catherine McCormack (Braveheart) as Veronica Franco, who can't marry her love, the noble Marco (Rufus Sewell, Dark City) because of her lowly birth. So she becomes a cour-tesan. Well-dressed soap ... Australia's latest nice little movie is Paperback Hero, a romantic comedy in the French Kiss/The Matchmaker tradition. Jack (Hugh Jackman) is a long-distance truckie with a secret - he's a top-selling romance writer, which isn't what blokes do in the Aussie outback, so he borrows his best friend Ruby's name. When a publisher turns up to meet his new star Jack and Ruby (Claudia Kar-van) have to move fast to cover his tracks ... Similar flavour to What Rats Won't Do, with James Frain and Natascha McElhone playing young lawyers who end up on opposite sides of the courtroom, and the bedroom ...

Silent Cradle features Lorraine Bracco (GoodFellas, Basketball Diaries) as a reporter who loses her baby in the delivery room. Months later, following up a story about an adoption agency, she finds that her baby - and many others - may still be alive, sold in an illegal adoption racket. Overwrought, late-night TV drama.