The Fight for Life

March. 07,1940

Rating：

5.5

Genre：

Drama History

Keywords：

Nurse Death Of Mother Receptionist

Trailer Synopsis Cast

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.

Myron McCormick as Dr. O’Donnell

Will Geer as Ballou

Dudley Digges as Chefarzt

Woody Guthrie as

Dorothy Adams as The Young Woman

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Reviews

Listonixio

1940/03/07

Fresh and Exciting

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Acensbart

1940/03/08

Excellent but underrated film

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Fatma Suarez

1940/03/09

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

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Bumpy Chip

1940/03/10

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

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Mozjoukine

1940/03/11

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!

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