Florence Nightingale (DVD)
APPROX. 140 MINS. - PROD. YEAR: 1985 - MPA RATING: NR
" Though slow-moving in spots, this biopic about the 'mother of modern nursing' stays close enough to the facts to be worthwhile.
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She should be a natural, but Florence Nightingale has been a tough subject for a biopic. That's because it's hard to film the actions of a saintly woman without having it come across as just a little schmaltzy. And there are moments in this 1985 TV movie that pile on the cheese. There are also moments when you look at Jaclyn Smith and think "Charlie's Angels" instead of Florence Nightingale, the British aristocrat who became so famous that only Queen Victoria rose above her.
But the production values are strong in this big-budget TV epic--and I call it that because it runs a whopping 140 minutes--and there are so many interesting facets of Nightingale's life that it's easy to get swept up in the narrative flow.
Though "Florence Nightingale" isn't a whitewash of the Lady with the Lamp--the woman who established nursing as a legitimate profession in England and whose work in the Crimean War revolutionized the way that wounded soldiers were cared for--she's made out to be a virgin as well as a saint, and that just wasn't the case. She was involved with more men outside of marriage than this movie lets on.
In fairness, though, that's not the point of the film. It's to dramatize the life of a woman who defied her parents and fought antiquated attitudes about women and their place in society. It's to show how a single woman took on both the political juggernaut that worked against positive change and the British military, in order to make things better. And how she denied her own happiness to focus on the happiness of others.
While the 2008 TV version-also a British production-presses the faith and religion buttons pretty hard, aside from several declarations by Florence that she heard a call from God when she was 17, this fact-based screenplay from Rose Leiman Goldemberg ("The Burning Bed") and Ivan Moffat ("Hitler: The Last Ten Days") serves up a secular portion of 19th-century history.
The film begins with shots of Embley Park, now a school. But in the 1840s the gargantuan mansion was home to William Nightingale (Jeremy Brett), his wife Fanny (Claire Bloom), and their daughters, Parthenope (Ann Thornton) and Florence (Smith). To show the lavish world of privilege that Miss Nightingale gives up, but also the reason why she felt motivated to do more with her life, the filmmakers begin with a grand party and the kind of polite conversation and manners that characterized the lives of aristocrats in Dickensian England. There was no middle class to speak of, only the very rich and the very poor, and hospitals were filthy places with doctors who are drunks and nurses those doctors thought of as nothing more than harlots--as Flo's stunned sister points out when she hears her of her aspiration to become a nurse. It was beneath her class, and women at that time really had no option other than marriage. Her parents wished that she would just accept the proposal of dashing poet and politician Richard Milnes (Timothy Dalton), but Florence strings him along. She feels closed-in. There were no careers available to women, and that's exactly what Florence wanted-nothing short of a radical departure from societal norms.
None of this was lost on the people in the first hospital she visits. And when she goes to Germany to study nursing and returns, expecting to practice her profession, she learns that women are no more permitted in men's wards of hospitals than they are in the gentlemen's club to which her father belongs. Even the nurses in women's wards oppose her ideas with a single defense: that's not the way it's done.
Eventually, as we see throughout the course of this film, Nightingale fights to incorporate her ideas-things like installing mechanical lifts (dumbwaiters) so the nurses don't have to waste their time carrying food, installing hot-water feeds, scrubbing floors, changing dressings frequently, opening windows for ventilation, and hiring a chemist on-site to reduce the chances of mistakes. None of these things were practiced at the time. Hospitals were filthy rooms with straw on the floor, patients sleeping side-by-side, none of them treated except to amputate a leg. And we do get the obligatory leg-amputation-without-chloroform scenes.
