The Fight for Life (1940)
The Fight for Life was documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz' first "dramatic" film, utilizing the talents of several top New York stage actors. A tribute to the Chicago Maternity Center and its efforts to provide the best possible care for destitute mothers, the film is based on the book of the same name by Paul de Kruif. Myron McCormick plays the largest role as a dedicated intern, while others in the cast include such theatrical heavywrights as Will Geer, Dudley Digges and Dorothy Adams. The film's many vignettes range from the tragic (a mother dying in childbirth in the opening scene) to the exultant (another mother rescued from the brink of death in a disease-ridden tenement). Filmed in Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland, Fight for Life is a worthwhile effort, though Lorentz seems more comfortable with the "actuality" scenes than with the dramatized passages.
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It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.
It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.
The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.
A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.
Pare (`The Plow That Broke the Plain') Lorentz' try to break into Hollywood is unsatisfactory both as the medical training film that they seemed to think they were making and as drama. It stops half way through - presumably to make it a suitable length for a short and then starts up again with another home birth.It is still interesting to watch all this talent stretching themselves - McCormick, later in `The Hustler', Crosby who filmed De Kruif's `Arrowsmith' and `High Noon' - not to mention the B movies of Maury Dexter and Roger Corman and Gruenberg who scored `All the Kings Men.'A lot of the playing is stilted, even by skilled performers like Digges, and the film loses all credibility with its bloodless natal deliveries but the seriousness of purpose of the makers registers and their filming of the Chicago slums remains graphic and alarming.Suzanne Davenport's 1977 "Chicago Maternity Hospital" gets stuck into this one mainly for it's not crediting female medicos with the achievement - other times, other customs!