Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1946

The Contenders:

Celia Johnson: Brief Encounter
Jennifer Jones: Duel in the Sun
Rosalind Russell: Sister Kenny
Oliva de Havilland: To Each His Own (winner)
Jane Wyman: The Yearling

Nursed Back to Health

Film: Sister Kenny
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

We live in many ways in the best possible time. Sure there are tons of problems around the world and it seems like many of them will never be solved. Some of those problems have the potential to kill us all, but we’ve weathered storms before. Medically, though, we’ve come a very long way. It’s been a long time since most people have had to worry about polio, which was the stuff of nightmares just a couple of generations ago. Sister Kenny is a film about polio and specifically about a radical treatment for polio victims. The film is based on the real life and experiences of the real Elizabeth Kenny. I don’t know how accurate it is, but it honestly plays like the truth.

In the years just before World War I, Elizabeth Kenny (Rosalind Russell) has become a nurse. Her friend and mentor Dr. McDonnell (Alexander Knox) would like her to work at his hospital, but she decides instead to live back at home in the Australian outback and be a bush nurse, tending to the local people who have no other medical care. Dr. McDonnell predicts she’ll last six months, but we flash forward to the people in the area throwing her a party on her third anniversary. During that party, she is called away for a case of a new illness that she has never seen. She sends off a telegram to McDonnell and waits for an answer. The diagnosis comes back as infantile paralysis (i.e. polio). Not knowing what to do, she treats her patient with hot compresses and then works their muscles once their muscle spasms have subsided.