Sister Kenny

In 1963 (when I was 17), my parents took me and my younger sister on a summer holiday to Whitby a coastal town in Yorkshire, UK.We stayed at a hotel there which showed this film as entertainment for the guests.I never forgot it nor the performance of Rosalind Russell which I regard as her best film and better than "His Girl Friday" with Cary Grant since it deals with a real person and real events, always more convincing in my book than mere fiction.She was well supported by actor Alexander Knox who played an orthopedic surgeon, friend and colleague and known to me as the surgeon "Mr Joyce" in the 1956 film "Reach for the Sky", who operates on the broken legs of Douglas Bader.I would have liked 20th Century Fox to have employed more Australian character actors but as there were few in Hollywood in 1946 and as Americans seem to have a hard time doing the Australian accent and as many were being demobbed in 1946, this is understandable.Other reviewers have described the screenplay and basic biography of Elizabeth Kenny satisfactorily, so I won't reiterate it.I awarded this film 8/10 and am grateful to Youtube for uploading it.

...and that is true now and apparently true 100 years ago when the box was much smaller.

The film opens with Elizabeth Kenny (Rosalind Russell) graduating from nursing school in Australia and returning home to the bush to celebrate with her parents along with her mentor, Dr. McDonnell (Alexander Knox). She there informs them she intends to be a rural nurse, basically a circuit rider nurse, who goes among the sparsely distributed rural population where she is needed. Like most women of the early 20th century, she intends her career to end when she marries her beau, Kevin (Dean Jagger).

Then one day Kenny is called to a house where the little girl is ill with horribly debilitating muscular spasms. She has no idea what is wrong, so she telegraphs Dr. McDonnell who says it is infantile paralysis (polio) and to treat the symptoms because nothing else can be done. So using her knowledge of biology and knowing nothing of the disease, she does just that. When the crisis passes and the girl cannot move her legs, Kenny studies the situation a bit and figures that the girl needs to relearn how to walk. The girl does walk normally again. She has five more cases that she treats the same way and all fully recover.

Kenny is angry that the doctors stodgily hold to the traditional treatment and refuse to give her treatment a second thought. They also forbid her to treat any more acute cases in this way. So she takes the crippled children the doctors have given up on and has marvelous success.

Needless to say this delays her marriage to Kevin to the point where she finally breaks it off with him for his sake. The years turn to decades, she eventually comes to America, and although the medical establishment never gives her treatments any credence, the young up and coming doctors are anxious to learn about her method because she is getting results.

All through the film much is said about how she always wanted ten children, but figured she would always hear the suffering of polio stricken children every time hers laughed, and resigned herself to being unmarried and childless. The final scene insinuates that she might not be so childless as she thinks.

The movie was a passion project for Russell, who worked with the Sister Kenny Foundation, and it shows through in the authenticity of her portrayal. Russell was well aware that biopics about cause crusaders were usually not cash cows, but she felt it was a film she really needed to do, although none of the studios initially showed any interest. She finally agreed to a three-picture deal with RKO if one of those pictures could be Sister Kenny.

I like this film, but it's hard to believe that it's set in Australia.

It has a strange idea of what Australia was like in the early 20th century. A bush dance is filled with Scots and Irish folk, and the music is bagpipes?! The accents are mostly British with the exception of the title role, which is played by Rosalind Russell, who has a distinctly American accent. Place names are mispronounced (like "Bris-bane" instead of "Bris-ban" for Brisbane).

And yet, there's a charm to this film. The real Elizabeth Kenny was an outsider who used unorthodox techniques and terminology to treat polio. It didn't cure the condition, but alleviated the symptoms. In the film she resolutely persists in practicing this and opposing the medical establishment, at a cost of her personal life.

Well worth watching.

This movie was most interesting to find and watch. At the age of three I had polio and received the Sister Kenny treatment in Minnesota during an epidemic. The results were as dramatic as the movie portrays. After one month in the hospital I walked out and without braces. My ability to speak clearly returned slowly but completely and my legs remained normal except for extreme exercise which would result in intense pain only relieved by wet heat and massage- that too eventually faded away especially after discovering the benefits of calcium and magnesium for the nerves and muscles.

The film was interesting and a commentary on medical protectionism that has merit as a present day commentary regarding alternative medicine. The US government also issued a commemorative stamp in Sister Kenny's honor. It really did deserve the Golden Globe award for Rosalind Russell's acting.

I wasn't expecting much from a biography of Sister Kenny, an Australian nurse who developed a method of treatment for children stricken with poliomyelitis. I could see it all. One child after breathing his last, "God bless Sister Kenny," while she sobbed at his bedside and held his hand while he slipped away. At the end, after her apotheosis, during a triumphant crescendo, a crippled boy throws away his crutches and cries, "I can WALK, mein Fuhrer!"

But no. Sister Kenny, knowing nothing about infantile paralysis, begins fiddling around with it in the Australian outback and develops a theory that is, in some senses, the exact opposite of the medical establishment's. That establishment is really "pig-headed", as she puts it. Well, they have to be, actually. The experts and their received wisdom can't be successfully challenged by a mere mortal. If they were, they wouldn't be "experts" anymore. She's successful, of course, or there would be no movie. All this takes place during the first half of the 20th century and has Sister Kenny traveling from Australia to Europe and to Minnesota. Old friends die. Children are apparently cured.

There are a couple of things that lift the film out of the ordinary biopic genre. One is Rosalind Russel's performance and the way her role is written by Dudley Nichols. She's impertinent and sarcastic. In fact she reminded me a lot of Margaret Mead, acerbic and distant, putting family life second to her career. Russel has never been better in what is a fairly demanding role.

Another point in its favor is that we are mercifully spared the sobbing and the dying and the children begging for help from a mothering figure. Russel is hardly maternal. Multiple opportunities for pointless and sentimental scenes were eschewed. Her humanity is on display in abundance but it's in code.

Nice job.