The Feminine Touch
Pat Jackson (1956)
For much of its ninety-minutes, the title seems inappropriately Woman’s Weekly-ish for this Ealing non-comedy, which is at pains to promote nursing as a noble calling but a tough life. The five student nurses of the story are based at St Augustine’s, a fictional NHS hospital in London (the filming locations included Guy’s Hospital), but the source of Iain McCormick’s screenplay is North American. The setting of the novel A Lamp is Heavy – by Sheila Mackay Russell, a Canadian former nurse – is a US hospital. The solemn, virtuous tone of the book’s title often suits Pat Jackson’s film, in spite of its regulation dose of awkward hearty humour, yet The Feminine Touch turns out to be well enough named. It’s emphasised early on that, when a nurse marries, she leaves the profession. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that the hospital matron (Diana Wynyard), in her opening address to the student nurses, has something of the mother superior about her. But the beautiful, conscientious heroine Susan (Belinda Lee) has taken a shine to Dr Jim Alcott (George Baker) even before she’s got through the hospital entrance and the main supporting character, Pat (Delphi Lawrence), is self-confident and a bit flighty. At the climax to the film, Matron is about to dismiss Pat for burning the candle at both ends and Susan for her part in a deception to try and protect Pat. Then Pat announces that she got married a few weeks previously. (You’re meant not to ask why she didn’t mention this before.) This is enough to remind Matron of her own youth, when she let her nursing career take precedence over the man she loved – a decision she has always regretted. Susan, who was about to make the reverse decision, rushes out to tell Jim that she’ll renounce her vocation and marry him after all.
Although this ending undermines what at first seemed to be distinctive about The Feminine Touch, it comes as no surprise. The film has by this stage developed a pattern of taking on a difficult issue and resolving it conventionally and evasively. Jessie (Mandy Miller), an orphan girl with a serious heart condition, is angry with God because her friend Tommy has a brain tumour and may die. Mandy Miller gets some real force into the girl’s outrage and agitation; George Baker gives Dr Alcott, a father figure to Jessie, credibly divided feelings. But Tommy comes back from the operating theatre alive and Alcott tells Jessie the young boy is ‘going to be all right’. Her unhappiness dissolves immediately. Susan’s quick thinking saves an elderly male patient. Her sympathetic ear gives a new lease of life to a woman (Dorothy Alison) who’s brought into hospital having tried to kill herself. (Even so, this character is pessimistically described in the cast list as ‘The suicide’.) This series of retreats may have made the picture more palatable to audiences in 1956 but it weakens it in long retrospect. Like much British cinema of the period, its potential interest at this distance in time is as an expression of social history. That interest is lessened in this case because Pat Jackson and Iain McCormick are chiefly concerned with things turning out right.
Belinda Lee wasn’t much of an actress but she’s surprisingly engaging as Susan and George Baker is a good foil to her. Delphi Lawrence is too easily sophisticated as Pat – she makes her invulnerable. The amusing actor who plays the medic Pat marries after a whirlwind romance is called Christopher Rhodes and his IMDB biography is certainly unusual[1]. The other student nurses are Adrienne Corri (garrulous Oirish Maureen), Barbara Archer (chipper Cockney Liz) and Henryetta Winters (ex-Roedean Ann). Diana Wynyard shows her class: she plays Matron intelligently and sometimes persuasively (no small achievement). St Augustine’s Hospital has a very small staff but Richard Leech appears briefly as a casualty doctor. Pat Jackson’s direction of the actors’ movement, particularly in cramped interiors, is very awkward.
1 June 2016
[1] ‘Sir Christopher Rhodes, 3rd baronet was the only son of Sir John Rhodes DSO, 2nd baronet and former chairman of Thomas Rhodes Ltd, cotton spinners and manufacturers. Educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He succeeded his father to the [baronetcy] in 1955. He served in the Essex regiment during the Second World War and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel winning the Croix de Guerre and the United States Legion Of Merit. He was 38 years old when he began his film career and specialised in well-bred military types for which he was ideally suited. Married twice, he died aged 50 at his Blakeney, Norfolk home.’