Polio as a Subject for the Movies

Above is some March of Dimes newsreel footage about the treatment of polio. In the early 1950s, the “fight” for a way to prevent polio became a “race” as the panic over yearly summertime polio epidemics grew more widespread and more fierce. In 1955, the vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk became available to the public, and thousands upon thousands of people brought their children to be vaccinated. That this was a new and largely untried serum, the public’s leap of faith had to be enormous. Perhaps the only thing greater than their faith was their fear of this horrific illness.

Knowing all that, it seems strange that there were not more movies with polio patients or polio treatment as a subject. When one considers other dreaded elements of the stressful post-war life that became fodder for many films, elements such as the fear of nuclear warfare, the fear of communism, the lurid explorations of crime, mental illness, and flying saucers, why was there not more examination in the movies of the greatest medical story of the day? A story that was so inherently dramatic?

Perhaps because polio was even scarier to most people than nuclear war, foreign enemies, bad guys, or aliens from another planet. Some of those films were fantasies or at least dealt with threats to modern society that were not as plausible or as fearsome as going to a public pool one day, developing a fever that night, and ending up in an iron lung in a matter of days.

There was “Sister Kenny” (1944) with Rosalind Russell which touched upon polio through the biography of the Australian nurse who developed her own methods of therapy for polio victims. We’ve also noted in the recently covered “Roughly Speaking” (1945), also with Rosalind Russell, that one of the children in the film had been a polio victim, and wore leg braces as a child, improving to using a cane as an adult. But she was only one member of a large family, and her story was not the central one.

Perhaps the most striking drama I can recall involving polio as a plot element, was an episode in the old “Loretta Young Show” on television, called “Earthquake”, originally aired in October of 1953. In this episode, Loretta plays the wife of a man who must stay in an iron lung at home because his polio has left him unable to breathe on his own. Set in a southern California town, when an earthquake occurs in the middle of the night and the electricity goes off, Loretta must manipulate the hand crank on the iron lung to keep the bellows working, to keep her husband breathing. When the crank breaks, she opens the machine, and manually pumps and massages her paralyzed husband’s chest for hours until help arrives. It is a grim story, and the triumphant message at the conclusion relates to their love for each other, and their perseverance in never giving up until he may someday recover.

Many people did recover from polio to varying degrees, but many did not. Though polio has been eradicated in most countries today, thanks to Dr. Salk and to Dr. Albert Sabine, there is still no cure. Here is a link to a news story from 2008 about a woman in an iron lung who, like the character in the melodramatic “Loretta Young Show”, faced calamity when her home lost power. She died. Her polio left her unable to live outside the iron lung. She had been living in an iron lung for 50 years, since childhood.

Possibly the most famous polio victim was of course President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at various times tried to hide his physical limitations, leading to a bit of controversy when his memorial statue in Washington, D.C. did not openly depict him in his wheelchair. Elements in the design were later changed to suggest his wheelchair beneath his cloak.

Actress Helen Hayes lost her 19-year-old daughter, Mary, to polio, and thereafter dedicated herself to the cause. Here is a link to an article, and a 1951 audio piece of Miss Hayes speaking on the Mary MacArthur Respirator Unit at Children’s Hospital in Boston, where she calls polio “that most frightening of diseases that strike children.”

The public, obviously, was very aware of the urgency to fight polio, but was there still some controversial element of showing polio victims for there to be so few feature films? Or was the illness, and its treatment, perceived by the public as too ghastly to be the subject of a movie drama, far more scary than the worse movie monster imaginable?

PBS showed an excellent documentary a few months ago on the “race” to develop the polio vaccine. A striking indirect message is that younger generations are likely ignorant of the magnitude of the fear of polio in society. That is both a good thing and a bad thing. Their ignorance of polio demonstrates they do not have to fear it. But if they want to know about this awful aspect of life in the early 1950s (and previously), they won’t learn much from the movies.

Do you recall any other movies that mentioned or in some way dealt with the subject of polio? Do you remember getting the shot, or the oral vaccine? Do you remember being afraid?

Below, Ella Fitzgerald delivers a public service announcement, as many stars did, for the March of Dimes in 1958.

True Life Movies Pt 2 - Roughly Speaking - 1945

We continue our look at a couple of views of “true life” movies with “Roughly Speaking” (1945). Directed by Michael Curtiz, this fast-paced film with breezy dialogue punctuated by clever quips from leads Rosalind Russell and Jack Carson has similarities to “The Crowd” (1928) which we looked at last Thursday. The differences have to do more with tone and outlook than with basic content.

Unlike the spare, almost allegorical modern Everyman tale of “The Crowd”, “Roughly Speaking” is a cluttered scrapbook based on the memoir of Louise Randall Pierson. Both films study lives of trial and struggle, and bad breaks. “The Crowd” is somber, sensitive, and artistic. “Roughly Speaking” is more rollicking, uplifting, and though it covers some crucial episodes in time, is lighter fare.

Rosalind Russell’s character begins life as a daughter of a well-to-do New England patriarch in the early days of the 20th Century. When Father dies leaving debts, Miss Russell hitches her star to secretarial school (where the prim lady dean reprimands her for wearing a skirt that shows her ankles) and begins a wild ride of feast and famine for the next several decades.

A typically robust and hearty Alan Hale has a brief role as her first boss, who doubts a woman can do the job of typing letters in his shipyard office, but when she high kicks his hat off, he gives her a leg up in the business world. So to speak.

This occurs in New Haven, and when she and her roomie at the boarding house (where not a toilet is seen -- see the last post on “The Crowd”) date some Yale men, we hear the first of several choruses throughout the movie of the Yale fight song. You’ll have it memorized by the end of the film.

Her first beau proposes marriage, but she is a feminist and wants to support herself and does not want to quit her job when they marry. Her work ethic will come in handy in later years when she’s broke most of the time.

Her husband is a banker, a bit of a quiet drudge, but very stable, at least until he decides, after their fourth child is born, that he doesn’t love her. He leaves her, and we hear no more of him for the rest of the movie. But in the ebullient early days of the 1920s, Russell meets a new beau, played by Jack Carson with that wonderful deft way he had of playing both a good guy and a rogue. Mr. Carson doesn’t mind that she’s an independent woman or that she has four kids. He is a lazy loafer who needs a good woman to make him shape up, which is what happens. They have a great chemistry on screen and play well off each other. They look like they’re having fun.

One business booms, then busts. A lot happens in the parade of years. One of the children has polio, and we see her struggle with early paralysis to later being able to walk with a brace and a cane. Another baby is born. They move constantly to either better, or cheaper, digs according to their circumstances. The family is close and extraordinarily happy, joking at just about everything, even their bouts with poverty. Miss Russell and Mr. Carson get grayer in that artistic manner of the movie makeup artist.

A newsboy brings a big black headline to their porch that announces the Great Depression, and we have the stoic comment by Carson, “I guess the party’s over.”

But there is still the underlying all-American optimism that makes them bounce off the canvas, continuing to feed on the faith they have in themselves and their own ingenuity over a montage of “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” and “We’re In The Money.”
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Finally by 1939, Carson gets a break, a job on the planning board of the New York City World’s Fair of that monumental year, but the rejoicing doesn’t last for long. At Russell’s 50th birthday party, where all the grown kids come home to help her eat cake and sing the Yale fight song, Rosalind Russell looks up from blowing out her candles to notice out the window over the fairgrounds that the Polish pavilion has turned off its lights. It’s a brief, but quietly dramatic moment in the film.

Young people seeing this film for the first time might not be aware of the significance of the statement, but it signals the beginning of World War II when Germany invaded Poland. Of all the foreign nations which sent exhibits to the New York 1939 World’s Fair, themed “The World of Tomorrow,” many Europeans could not return home once the war started. They were stuck there on the fairgrounds, in their native costumes, no longer trying to drum up business for countries that suddenly no longer existed.

Again, the wry comment by Carson, “Well, there goes the world of tomorrow.”

But the war puts the whole family on active duty. Who is not in the service is working in the shipyard. Miss Russell works in the office, as she did so many years ago, and Mr. Carson is a welder.

We have the final iconic scene where the boys are leaving at the train station, and the youngest, just 17, hands Mother and Father the permission slip for him to join the service. They have to put on their reading glasses now, and the makeup department has colored their hair completely gray. Russell and Carson capture beautifully the heartache and tension of the moment.


Afterward, the two aging empty-nesters sitting on the bench in the train station while the camera pulls back and they are lost in that crowd that threatened to swallow James Murray in “The Crowd,” argue about what would be the next business to start, a farm perhaps, and the movie ends in a hectic, though buoyant way.

This is the main difference between “The Crowd” and “Roughly Speaking,” the despair of one and the optimism of the other. One wonders how Murray’s character in “The Crowd” would have dealt with the Great Depression or World War II. Perhaps like the real-life actor who played him, he would have been long dead by then, crushed by his own inability cope.

Happier circumstances awaited Rosalind Russell, who after several years of comedies and minor dramas, this film began a turning point in her career where she was offered much stronger roles.

One might conjecture that “The Crowd” was made during generally good times, and during eras of political stability and a fair amount of prosperity, it’s easier to look at the hard side of life. During the Great Depression and the war, the movies were less eager to take a grim stance. Optimism was what was needed, or at least that’s what the movie studios perceived. After the war, movies got realistic again, but that was okay. We could take it by then.

True Life Movies Pt 1 - "The Crowd" - 1928

We begin a two-part series today comparing two films which are similar, and completely different. That they are so similar, and so completely different, may not be ironic, just signs of the times. Perhaps the films are what they are simply because they were made when they were made. Today we examine “The Crowd” (1928), and we conclude on Monday with “Roughly Speaking” (1945).

Each film deals with a kind of “parade of years” theme which shows the main characters through many eras of their lives, and focuses particularly on the misfortunes they experience. Both handle this deftly, and with a remarkable degree of humor. “The Crowd” achieves a stark realism, despite its simplistic treatment, that is more artful, and perhaps is even more easy to relate to today than “Roughly Speaking”, which is so uplifting that we are inclined to remark “they don’t make films like that anymore”, something we usually do with heartwarming films of that World War II era that are so fun to watch, but which have very little resemblance to our lives today.

“The Crowd”, with its wry tone, could have been made yesterday rather than decades ago, and is often considered director King Vidor’s masterpiece. We follow the life of Everyman, an office worker named John Sims, from the moment he is born on July 4, 1900 (the symbolism here to put both the nationalistic stamp on our Everyman and therefore ourselves, and to put him smack at the beginning of our American Century), up to the late 1920s when the film was made, the heyday of The Age of Wonderful Nonsense.

The baby is born to a proud papa who predicts great things for him, but the march of time has different plans for our John. Even at the start of the movie depicting the birth, we may well be startled to see such unaccustomed realism in an era of filmmaking reliant on exaggerated pantomime, fantasy worlds, and mandatory happy endings. The doctor holds up an infant by his ankles (doll or baby?), and smacks his bottom as if to show the moment of birth in a tableau far more bold than anything that would have been filmed in the 1930s or 1940s.

When John is still a boy, he arrives home to learn of the death of his father. The scene where we see him, stunned, climbing the stairs toward the camera to his father’s deathbed is eerie and heartbreaking. We don’t know if having lost his father at a young age is what makes the adult John so lacking in direction. We only see as time goes on that he remains just as helpless as this in moments of decision or trauma.

John is played by James Murray, one of the most natural actors of the silent film era, whose performance in this film is sensitive and stunning. He hits all the right notes, from the humorous scenes, to the tragic ones. John works in an insurance company, and shots of his desk situated among a maze of others you may recognize as well in “The Apartment” (1960), which director Billy Wilder seemed to have taken for a model. All the shots of New York City have that wonderful natural and unselfconscious feel of 1920s films we’ve noted before that are so common in the backgrounds of the films of Harold Lloyd. There is no cozy and artificial feel of a set.

John is coaxed by a co-worker to come out on a double date to Coney Island. At first he must be persuaded. Gradually as they come down their giant office building in the elevator, John warms to the idea. (He is castigated by the elevator operator for not facing front, one of the many times John will suffer for not fitting in with The Crowd.) By the time they have reached the street, John, easily swayed, meets his date and becomes a party animal.

He and his pal take a moment to stare up the skirts of their dates as they climb to the upper deck of an open omnibus. They spend the evening at Coney Island amusement park, and on the sleepy ride home, John sees an advertisement placard directed at newlyweds who want to furnish their new homes. This gives him the impulse to propose marriage to his date.

Obviously, scenes such as this are meant to hurry the plot along, but it does not seem strange for John to be so easily influence by an ad. He is so easily influenced by everything.

His bride is played by Eleanor Boardman, who likewise gives a touching and realistic performance. There are romantic scenes on their train to their honeymoon destination of Niagara Falls, and in their one-room apartment by the El tracks. Soon, however, life intrudes on their bliss, first in the form of her mother and brothers, who seem to disapprove of John, and his foolishly boyish tricks. John is not much of an insurance “company man”. He is really a writer of advertising jingles, an habitual contest entry fanatic, a lazy strummer of the ukulele, an impulsive juggler, and a man so easily distracted by any of these things, that he is prevented from either advancing at work or helping his wife with the house chores. She must constantly, though gently, prod him and keep him to task like a child with ADHD.

(As far a realism goes, we might musingly note this film also shows a toilet in the bathroom, something which would be absent pretty much from all bathrooms and all mention in Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s. We even get to see the inside of the tank as John fumbles with it because the toilet is running. Decades pass, but some things never change.)

As the years pass, his boredom with his job, his failure to be a success wears on him and he becomes occasionally churlish. Then one of his contest entries wins, and for a moment we think his ship has come in. However, tragedy of unimaginable horror occurs, and nearly destroys them.

After that, just the business of getting up every day and finding a purpose to go on becomes John’s monumental task. He quits his job, and finds, then quits, several others, not being able to stick with anything. The title cards provide some excellent prose, observations on life more than descriptions of the action.

One tells us, “We do not know how big the crowd is, and what opposition it is…until we get out of step with it.”

Finally, his wife considers leaving him, frustrated by his whining refusal to accept a job offer. His brother-in-law tells him, “You’ve never been anything but a big bag of wind.” It’s true. A loveable guy, a fun guy, but maddeningly undependable, and a big bag of wind. John is shocked by his wife’s criticism, and comes close to taking his life, but instead takes a job wearing a clown suit, and a sandwich board advertising a restaurant, juggling to attract attention. It was just such a person he ridiculed early in the movie. Now, he is the clown, but absurdly grateful to get a job he can handle.

Success is usually measured in dollars in our society, but sometimes we might remember than finding a job that matches our skills is success enough for people out of step with The Crowd.

The end gives us that iconic scene of John, his wife, and their son watching a vaudeville show, as the camera pans back to show the fullness of the audience, as John and his family is lost in The Crowd. They are together, and for the moment, content, but we do not really know if it is a happy ending.

What many film buffs associate with this film is the real-life tragedy of its star, James Murray. King Vidor chose him personally for this film, admiring his natural abilities. Murray was a newcomer to film, reportedly insecure and overwhelmed by the sudden fame which greeted him when this film was released. Some felt he was really playing himself in this movie, and though he gave other good performances in films for the next few years, was unable to handle the pressure of a Hollywood career.

Murray became an alcoholic, and soon, like his character John Sims, could not keep a job. In 1936, he drowned in the Hudson River; though it is not clear if this was a suicide. He was 35 years old. Reportedly King Vidor was so moved by Murray and his tragic life, he would one day write a film script about him, but the movie was never made.

“Roughly Speaking”, which we’ll take a look at Monday, was based on the true-life memoirs of Louise Randall Pierson, but “true life” had a different feel to it in this 1945 movie than the hauntingly artistic reality of “The Crowd.”

If you’ve not seen “The Crowd”, now in the public domain, you can watch it in several parts beginning here on YouTube.