Sister Kenny (RKO Radio) is a handsome, emotional film biography, skillfully knitted together out of interesting fact, harmless fiction and debatable propaganda. It will probably entertain most moviegoers—and it will most certainly raise the hackles on the American Medical Association's collective neck.
Sister Kenny is almost hysterically partisan to one of modern medicine's most controversial figures: Sister Elizabeth Kenny, the tough-minded. Australian nurse who has her own theories about the nature of infantile paralysis and insists that her own methods of treating the disease (hot packs and exercises) are the one & only effective treatment. Poliomyelitis is the movie's chief villain. But organized medicine, stupidly, relentlessly belittling the indomitable heroine, is also cast as a menace.
Rosalind Russell, aging slowly from a young (22) bush nurse to a hearty, outspoken spinster of 59, is excellent as Sister Kenny. A good friend and admirer of her living model and currently a director of the Kenny Foundation in Minneapolis, Actress Russell was the one who nagged RKO into making the picture. While remaining more handsome and lovable than her model could ever expect to be, she nonetheless manages to suggest the cantankerous personality which has made the real Sister Kenny a great fighter and a great nuisance.
Writer-director-producer Dudley Nichols (The Informer, The Long Voyage Home) has oversimplified, but he has not shirked his job. The romantic love theme is subordinated to the hard business of dramatizing a scientific subject. He also got efficient performances out of Alexander Knox, Dean Jagger and the late Philip Merivale.
If it were not for its heartbreaking subject, Sister Kenny could be lauded as a slick, above-average screen biography. But the whole subject of polio, its cause and its treatment, is of deep concern to every parent in the world. Any distortion or any half-truth on the subject can be both cruel and dangerous. The film's most outstanding distortions, implied rather than explicitly stated:
1) Most doctors and medical organizations pigheadedly denounce Sister Kenny and reject her technique. The facts: practically all orthopedists acknowledge medicine's debt to Sister Kenny and employ her treatment in whole or in part. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis alone has spent $2 million for advancement of physical therapy, including the Kenny technique. But even when they use the Kenny treatment, most doctors agree that polio is a disease of the nervous system, vigorously reject the Kenny theory that it is primarily a muscle-&-skin disorder.
2) All polio victims treated by Sister Kenny get up and walk; those treated by other orthopedists become lifelong 'brace-&-crutch cripples. The facts: Sister Kenny's record in Minneapolis, over a five-year period, has just about matched the average for all modern polio treatment: 6% deaths, 16% remaining severely paralyzed.