Dudley Nichols (1946)

Elizabeth Kenny (1880-1952) was an Australian nurse whose methods of treating polio, in the days before mass vaccination, brought her into decades of conflict with the orthopaedic surgery establishments of Australia and, subsequently, America.  (According to Wikipedia, Kenny’s methods of muscle rehabilitation formed the basis of modern physiotherapy.)  In this biopic – made during her lifetime (and presumably while she was still working) – Sister Kenny is incarnated by Rosalind Russell, whose performance is fascinating and eventually impressive.  Russell has natural authority and expresses it economically.   She also occasionally uses her comic skills to unusual effect here – rattling off a long sentence of medical polysyllables with a straight face.  When we first see the heroine at work as a bush nurse in the early years of the twentieth century (the passage of time is confusing in these early stages, and the story tends to lurch forward throughout), Russell easily gets across Liz Kenny’s benignant bossiness.   Russell is too keen, though, to display her acting powers in the emotionally fraught sequences of Kenny’s treating infantile paralysis.  Her voice communicates the anxiety she’s feeling so emphatically that it would surely have frightened the little girl who lies in bed unable to move her limbs.

Kenny’s passionate commitment to her work matters to her more than either being liked or personal happiness with her patient beau, Kevin Connors.    The scenes between these two are consistently good (even their clumsily conceived brief reunion in London during the Munich crisis of 1938).  Dean Jagger’s Connors is a fine blend of tenderness and exasperation; when she’s with him, Russell gives us a sense of Liz Kenny’s conflicted feelings.  Elsewhere, she’s too unvaryingly harsh.  We can see that Sister Kenny’s uncompromising manner gets up the nose of a medical establishment (represented by an eminent orthopaedic surgeon played by Philip Merivale) scandalised by the idea that a woman – a nurse without a degree – could have anything to teach them.  It’s harder to see why her loyal supporters (epitomised by a Queensland GP played by Alexander Knox) don’t experience greater resistance towards her.

The real surprise and achievement of the movie is Rosalind Russell’s playing of the older Kenny.  (The ageing make-up for her, Jagger and Knox is exceptionally good.).  Instead of acting elderly, Russell retains her upright carriage and forthright walk but she tones down her earlier stridency.  She’s much more natural and comfortable playing a woman twenty years or more older than she herself was when she made the film.  No one attempts an Australian accent (Liz Kenny is of Celtic  stock and it would have been better if some of the older members of the cast hadn’t attempted Scottish or Irish accents).  In Russell’s case it’s a real positive – an expression of Sister Kenny’s proud non-conformism – although there were times (especially when he’s in military uniform) that I found myself forgetting that Dean Jagger was meant not to be an American.  The script by Dudley Nichols, Alexander Knox and Mary McCarthy (a different one), based on the memoir And They Shall Walk which Kenny wrote with Martha Ostenso, is full of the clichés of the genre but Nichols treats the material with likeable earnestness.  He spends a good deal of screen time showing the actual medical treatments.  Perhaps audiences got frustrated by this and by Sister Kenny’s singleness:  Wikipedia says the film lost RKO $660,000.

25 January 2013