The Feminine Touch

There's nothing out of place in The Feminine Touch, a by the numbers melodrama that tells the story of a group of student nurses as they make their way through school. The acting is fine, the direction competent and the story sufficiently interesting to hold the viewers attention. Add it up and you have a watchable movie, but really, not much more than that. Clichéd characters and situations are a major liability in this film. There's doe eyed Susan (Belinda Lee),the cynical world weary Pat (Adrienne Cory) and the handsome Dr Alcott (George Baker)all delivering flat, colourless dialogue in you've seen it all before situations. The film looks great in Technicolor and the pacing is good, but you get the sense that it could have been much better.

One of the last films to be shot at Ealing before moving in Charles Barr's words to "a corner of the MGM studios at Elstree"; although George Baker is top-billed the film is very much about the women.

John Davis took some persuading to make it, and was presumably responsible for the decision to make it in Technicolor; which shows up Adrienne Corri's titian mane a treat, although Belinda Lee quickly assumes centre stage cast against type as a caring sister of mercy.

Memorable in supporting roles are Diana Wynyard as The Matron (whose role basically consists of three speeches; one of which actually contains the word 'colostomy'), Mandy Miller (still billed only as 'Mandy') in colour and with the power of speech, declaring God "a bully, He's cruel and beastly!", and Dorothy Alison as The Suicide.

This film was presumably one of the last produced by Michael Balcon at Ealing.Maybe it shows just how much he was out of touch with the public that the studios had to close.Remember that only a year or two before the Doctor series had started to great commercial success.Maybe Balcon thought that he could mine the same vein only for a dramatic film.In fact this film resembles "The Lamp Still Burns" right down to the matron's final speech.However as things have advanced 12 years since then the nurses are allowed to marry especially doctors.Everything about this film is too pat and clichéd and by and large the characters are rather uninteresting.In any event ITV was about to start "Emergency Ward 10" which of course would be the beginning of TV obsession with medical dramas.

Possibly produced as a propaganda film to aid recruitment to the still embryonic NHS (the use of colour suggesting access to funds for one thing) this film goes beyond the often stilted characterisations of women in British movies of the 50s, and offers some genuine insight into the reality of the experience. I must say that as someone who knows women now in the lot late 80s who were indeed nurses at this time, it's a fascinating social document. It is a surprisingly frank and adult script, well written and unafraid to tackle (albeit woth the restraint typical of the times) some difficult subjects including the absence of unions, the reality of the donkey work tht made up so much of the job, the low pay, sexual harassment, dying children who are aware of their mortality) and so on. It also speaks to the changing nature of society after WW2, showing the mixing of classes, the growing possibility for women to be independent and so on. Naturally it has its cliches (all the doctors are men, but this was the reality) and there is a now rather unnecessary and trite, stereotypical budding romance. But overall a fascinating and enlightening insight, a window on an important phase in British society.

This film was called "The Feminine Touch" in England, "The Gentle Touch" in the USA, and "A Lamp is Heavy" in Canada. (The Canadian title apparently came from the book on which the film was based.)

The film has an unreasonably low rating here of 5.4 out of 10. I cannot understand this. True, as the first reviewer here states, this film is a conventional melodrama about student nurses in England in the postwar period. However, given the many positive things about the film with the reviewer concedes, the reviewer seems to rates it a little too harshly, giving it only 5 out of 10. The reviewer's concessions of quality to me make the film worth more than that. To me 5 out of 10 means "poor" and 6 out 10 means "weak"; this film is mediocre in terms of originality of plot, but it's well-done, and it surely deserves better than a 6.5, so I give it a 7.

To be sure, being much like the episodes of a competently done "doctors and nurses in a hospital" television show, it does not strike one as particularly fresh in contents; but if we weren't saturated with decades of such TV shows, we would probably judge the film more leniently.

That said, I would not advise anyone to go out of the way to buy this film by itself, but it is available with 3 other films in one of the inexpensive 4-film Ealing rarities sets (PAL format, Region 2 DVD), and as one of the films in the set is the spritely romantic comedy *Young Man's Fancy* (1939) by Robert Stevenson, you get this film thrown in essentially for free, so it's a no-lose proposition to try it out.