I've mentioned British author A.J. Cronin before, and his medical novels from the era just before World War II in the UK. One of the movies based on a Cronin novel that I hadn't seen before shows up on TCM a few months back: Vigil in the Night. Since the cast sounded interesting, I decided to record it to do a review on it here.
The movie starts out with a camera panning over an establishing reference sign of a Shereham County Hospital, in Shereham, somewhere in England, and the hospital's isolation ward. The attending nurse on duty is Anne Lee (Carole Lombard), working a bit past her shift at 6:10 AM tending to diphtheria patients for whom the most important thing is that their tube not becoming blocked. As I said, she's working a bit past the end of the shift because the nurse who is supposed to come on at 6:00 is late, presumably again. That nurse is Lucy Lee (Anne Shirley), a trainee nurse who doesn't yet have her "certficate". She also just happens to be Anne's sister, and definitely not as good a nurse as Anne.
Sure enough, after showing up those ten minutes late, Lucy promptly goes into the ward kitchen to make herself some tea, and the ominous music playing over the screen makes it quite clear that Something Very Bad is about to happen. That something is the kid's tube getting blocked, and the kid's arm movements make it clear that he's dying thanks to Lucy's negligence. Lucy returns to the wart to find the kid dead, which brings in all the staff. When the doctor asks when the tube became blocked, Anne lies and says five minutes to six. With that she's taking the blame for her sister, in part because she wants Lucy to get that nursing certificate, even though Lucy is insistent that she's never going to become a good nurse like Anne is.
Anne is able to get another job at a hospital in Manchester. She's happy for the work despite the matron (Ethel Griffies) being brutally honest about the working conditions. Her work takes her into the office of Dr. Prescott (Brian Aherne), chief of surgery, and Anne realizes she want to be a nurse in the surgery ward. She even sits in the gallery when the chairman of the hospital board, Matthew Bowley, is operated on, and takes a risk by suggesting that the nurses actually attending have not counted the cotton bandages properly. She turns out to be right, but Bowley's giving her a check is also a huge breach of ethcs.. Still, it brings her even closer to Dr. Prescott. As you can guess, Prescott and Anne begin to fall in love.
Meanwhile, Lucy is finally getting her certificate, and matron needs more nurses, so offers Anne a day off to bring Lucy back. The bus crashes just before another nurse can tell matron what happened at Shereham, but it also serves to give scenes of Anne having to do more dedicated nursing. Heaven knows there's going to be more of that over the course of the movie. If diphtheria, surgery, and bus crashes aren't enough, the climax deals with a meningitis outbreak.
A.J. Cronin was a doctor as well as a writer, and he had decided ideas on how the profession should be run. Indeed, watching Vigil in the Night, it sometimes feels as if "the message" is getting in the way of the story, much like with Stanley Kramer and Not as a Stranger. That's a bit of a shame, because Carole Lombard does a very fine job here. She had spent most of the second half of the 1930s doing all those screwball comedies, and wanted to show that she could really be a serious actress, which is why she made movies like this one. And she (and the film) mostly succeeds.
So if you can take that there's going to be a message practically hitting you over the head at times, I think you'll like Vigil in the Night.
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