Movie review - "The Lamp Still Burns" (1943) ***

You learn something new every day - I'd never heard of Rosamund Johns but apparently in 1944 she was the second most popular British female star after Margaret Lockwood. It's not hard to see how her terribly sensible attitude and non-threatening prettiness were so liked - she's a much better actor than, say, Phyllis Calvert, who specialised in good girls.

She's the no-nonsense star of this no-nonsense look at nursing - she plays an architect who decides to give up her trade and go into nursing. There's some semi-documentary training sequences (I'm assuming it's all authentic) and a soapier plot where she falls in love with her old boss, Stewart Granger (looking very young and dashing), who becomes a patient after an air raid and suffers a bit of amnesia. This gives rise to lots of talk about whether a woman can have a man and career, etc.

It's World War Two feminism - we see lots of women in positions of power (the sister, a doctor, the lead has one career and swaps it for another). Even when Johns tends Granger she's got the power - he lies on his back and has his forehead tended. But the girls can't have it all.

This is political in other ways - it's pointed out that the hospital depends on charity, nurses are badly paid and the whole system needs reform. Indeed the last five minutes or so contain more speeches than you get in Parliament. But they're all good points, even if laid on with a trowel. And the ending is kind of open - Johns doesn't say she can never marry Granger, just not while conditions are the way they are. Fascinating as a piece of history rather than drama, but still gripping.

Performances are all fine - Granger already had authority, even if his inexperience does show; there's an excellent catalogue of elder character actors, particularly the men playing the hospital board.