Les patients de Mademoiselle Evers

*spoilers*

It was hard for me to sympathize with the central character, Nurse Evers, portrayed by Woodard. I thought that she betrayed the men and was in denial. Subsequently, she was locked in because of the lying and deceit and tried to make up for it by dedicating her life to the men she helped deceived. That only resulted, however, in two more wasted lives, hers and the man that loved her.

I kept wondering, what is wrong with this woman, is she nuts or what?! As far as I am concerned with the study conflicted with their true "calling" as health care professionals. During the senate investigation Ms. Evers (Woodard) was asked "What in the world did you think you were doing??!! My sentiments, exactly.

This very solid movie is a recreation of the Tukseegee experiments, in which a group of African American men were lied to about receiving treatment for syphilis, and were simply allowed to die from the disease as a part of a government "study" even though a completely effective treatment (simple penicillin) had been found early on.

There's a good performance here from Alfre Woodward as Eunice Evers, the compassionate nurse who signs on to help with the treatment program and then, after the funding for the program runs out, stays with the program once it becomes a study of how the men will fare without treatment. She gets caught up in the lie, insisting to the end that something worthwhile had come out of this experiment, but throughout the movie has definite moral qualms about this which are overcome by her desire to care for the men who are dying of the disease.

It's a very sad fact that this is a true story. It's treated as a flashback, as Miss Evers testifies before a U.S. Senate Committee hearing on the experiment. The study apparently ran for forty years (beginning in 1932) and most of the afflicted men died without receiving any treatment for the disease. The closing captions tell us that the survivors and the families of those who died received financial compensation of ridiculously small amounts, and that it was not until 1997 that the United States Government (through President Clinton) actually apologized for what had been done. This is a very sad movie almost the whole way through - certainly not one that will lift your spirits, but it's an important movie about something that should never have been allowed to happen in the first place.

I have seen this film several times and use it as a teaching aid when I teach my high school psychology class, as it brings up issues concerning unethical treatment as well as brain disorders (in this case syphilis). The film is VERY moving and you can't help but get absorbed into the film due to its excellent writing and characterizations. About the only reason the film doesn't merit a 10 is that the background for the movie is vague and I needed to research on my own. I found that the movie was based on a play which was a fictionalized account of a true study done in the Southern US. Like the real case, the participants were lied to and told they were getting treatment. As a result, most died a long and horrible death due to a slow disintegration of the brain. The character of Miss Evers, by the way, was fictional as were the names of the other participants. However, despite this, this in no way minimizes the horror of the real-life tale. This is a sad and moving must-see film.

I bought this together with "A Lesson Before Dying" by the same director and whilst I found the latter well-filmed, engrossing and very good on character analysis, I found Miss Evers' Boys to be a bit of a disappointment. You don't really get taken up into the story. Picture quality is hazy and fuzzy and you end up wondering really where Miss Evers was going in life ........... nowhere ! When you read the synopsis, you think you're in for a good, emotional, heart-rending story. However, that is not the impression which was conveyed to me. Miss Evers' even refuses romance, which could have been a saving grace. Why didn't she subtilise more penicillin if she was so concerned ? I tend to like these "racial" dramas, even though they are over-romanticized, but this one left me pretty near cold !

This is a tough one to review. For me, the subject is horrifying, and that the country I live in would do this is sickening, though of course, the U.S. President today would probably green light this kind of human suffering in a minute, in light of his recent actions against minorities. Some 400 odd men are observed, but not cured, and the justification is for the betterment of the "race" and that those men's sacrifice would be for the greater good. Yeah, tell that to those men, who could have been cured with one shot of penicillin!

So the subject = 5 stars. But the movie isn't that great. The romance subplot is really boring and uninteresting. And the quality of both the film and the sound is poor, though that might be the disc I watched. I would say you should watch it, due to the importance of the topic, but maybe skip any dating/romance scenes between Alfre Woodard and Laurence Fishburne, two dang fine actors who could not save those scenes. Oh, and just to see and hear Ossie Davis is always worth it!