Anna Neagle who had previously played Queen Victoria plays the title role in Nurse Edith Cavell, a woman who became a symbol for British feminism and patriotism with her death a martyr to the Allied cause in World War I. Later on Neagle would also play Florence Nightingale the woman who created the nursing service in the British Empire as a profession for women. In a sense Cavell owed the life she led and her death to Florence Nightingale.
We only see Cavell's life in those last couple of years. She was a British subject and was living in Belgium where she was on a mission, creating a female nursing service in that country when war broke out.
For reasons I don't understand as an open British subject she should have been summarily interred when war was declared. But the Germans did not do that, instead they let her work in their hospitals where she tended both German and Allied wounded. By all accounts her conduct was exemplary, she was a nurse first. Later on she organized a group that helped Allied prisoners who escaped get to neutral Netherlands or unoccupied France. It took some doing but with Captain George Sanders of German Intelligence Cavell was apprehended.
Shooting her shocked the world however and doing it on a charge of treason was highly dubious since she wasn't a German subject. The American minister to Belgium tried to intervene, but the Germans were intransigent on the death penalty. Cavell was shot by a firing squad and became a British heroine.
Cavell was 50 when she was killed and Anna Neagle was way too young for the part. But throughout the film she carries herself with restraint and dignity and her portrait is superb. She is nicely assisted by such players as Edna May Oliver, May Robson, and Zasu Pitts all coming from America for this film. Sanders as usual is the perfect ruthless and inhuman hun. The film in America was released by RKO and on September 1, 1939 just as the war in Europe broke out. There was more than an inkling that this war would be against a Germany light years more ruthless than the Wilhelmine Monarchy ever was.
The copy I saw and rented from Amazon is in sad need of restoration. It should be as a tribute to a British heroine portrayed by one of the United Kingdom's greatest cinema stars.
We only see Cavell's life in those last couple of years. She was a British subject and was living in Belgium where she was on a mission, creating a female nursing service in that country when war broke out.
For reasons I don't understand as an open British subject she should have been summarily interred when war was declared. But the Germans did not do that, instead they let her work in their hospitals where she tended both German and Allied wounded. By all accounts her conduct was exemplary, she was a nurse first. Later on she organized a group that helped Allied prisoners who escaped get to neutral Netherlands or unoccupied France. It took some doing but with Captain George Sanders of German Intelligence Cavell was apprehended.
Shooting her shocked the world however and doing it on a charge of treason was highly dubious since she wasn't a German subject. The American minister to Belgium tried to intervene, but the Germans were intransigent on the death penalty. Cavell was shot by a firing squad and became a British heroine.
Cavell was 50 when she was killed and Anna Neagle was way too young for the part. But throughout the film she carries herself with restraint and dignity and her portrait is superb. She is nicely assisted by such players as Edna May Oliver, May Robson, and Zasu Pitts all coming from America for this film. Sanders as usual is the perfect ruthless and inhuman hun. The film in America was released by RKO and on September 1, 1939 just as the war in Europe broke out. There was more than an inkling that this war would be against a Germany light years more ruthless than the Wilhelmine Monarchy ever was.
The copy I saw and rented from Amazon is in sad need of restoration. It should be as a tribute to a British heroine portrayed by one of the United Kingdom's greatest cinema stars.