The Girl in White

About a year ago, I mentioned that I had intended to DVR the June Allyson movie The Girl in White but instead recorded Two Sisters from Boston. When TCM did its series on biopics of women, they re-ran The Girl in White. Recently I got around to watching it, and since it's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, I'm happy to do a review of it.

Allyson plays Emily Dunning, who at the beginning of the movie is moving into a new place in New York sometime in the 1890s with her heavily-pregnant mother. Mom goes into labor, and Emily has to find a doctor. The only one she can find on such short notice is Dr. Yeomans (Mildred Dunnock), who happens to be a woman doctor, which was almost unheard of back in the 1890s. But meeting Yeomans gives Emily the idea that she too is going to go to college and then medical school and become a doctor. Yeomans is more than sympathetic to Emily, but warns her of the hard road she's going to have ahead.

Still, Emily does go on to college and medical school, studying hard since she feels she needs to be better than all the other medical students, all male, or they won't respect her otherwise. Indeed, most of them tend to make life a bit difficult for Emily, although Ben Barringer (Arthur Kennedy) is a lot nicer to her. The two fall in love, although that's going to cause some problems.

After finishing medical school, Emily plans to go back to New York and hopes to get residency at a hospital there. Ben gets the chance to further his research at Harvard, and there's a conflict over whether Emily should follow as Ben thinks a wife should do. But Emily is firm on going back to New York to help the people she grew up with.

But getting that residency isn't going to be easy, since Emily is a woman. She applies to Gouverneur Hospital, and the chief of staff there, Dr. Pawling (Gary Merrill) is reluctant to accept her. But her grades are so stellar that eventually he's forced to give in. Some accommodations have to be made, of course, since Emily can't actually room with the male doctors. Some of the male doctors try to punish her by changing the duty roster to have her constantly "on call", but this doesn't really stop Emily.

Emily is determined and not always orthodox, as we see when she's theoretically too small to help a very tall sailor (James Arness) with a dislocated shoulder, or when she continues to try to save a patient another intern declared dead (she's successful). She, and ultimately Dr. Yeomans too, gets a chance to shine when there's a typhoid epidemic in the city.

The Girl in White is the sort of programmer that MGM was actually pretty good at making. I know I've criticized MGM here for making stuff that looks too glossy, but a lot of their little programmers and period pieces turn out to be as entertaining as the prestige stuff. The Girl in White is an unpretentious little movie with June Allyson appealing in her role and Kennedy quite good as the man who ultimately has the courage to realize he's got a woman (in real life the two would marry) who's going to have a professional career no matter what. MGM takes liberties with real events for Hollywood purposes, but they work for the story.

If you want a pleasant enough movie about an interesting historical figure, I can definitely recommend The Girl in White.