My heart sank when I read the final credit on this; Dudley Nichols is someone I always associate with ponderous, heavy drama, with little or no light relief and my abiding impression is that he would be the perfect choice to adapt and direct Eugene O'Neill for the screen. He was, in the early days of Sound both prolific and popular though I tend to remember him for things like The Informer rather than, say, screwball comedy. In this case he makes a decent fist out of the story of a real person, Elizabeth Kenny, who stumbled on a method of treating children with symptoms of polio - a relatively obscure disease in the post Word War One years - and spent virtually the rest of her life in conflict with the degree-possessing members of the medical profession, indeed at one stage when she confronts her chief antagonist in mid-lecture there are shades of Inherit The Wind when the set-in-his-ways surgeon takes on the persona of William Jennings Bryan, who slavishly believed every word in the Bible no matter how risible just because it was IN the bible, and Elizabeth Kenny stands for the more reasonable Clarence Darrow. Rosalind Russell, a fine actress in both drama and comedy, went on to portray another real life person, equally strong-minded and forceful, the stage mother from hell Mama Rose in Gypsy and both portrayals were Oscar-worthy. This is a fine film that deserves to be much better known than it is.
Review of Sister Kenny
