This film was called "The Feminine Touch" in England, "The Gentle Touch" in the USA, and "A Lamp is Heavy" in Canada. (The Canadian title apparently came from the book on which the film was based.)
The film has an unreasonably low rating here of 5.4 out of 10. I cannot understand this. True, as the first reviewer here states, this film is a conventional melodrama about student nurses in England in the postwar period. However, given the many positive things about the film with the reviewer concedes, the reviewer seems to rates it a little too harshly, giving it only 5 out of 10. The reviewer's concessions of quality to me make the film worth more than that. To me 5 out of 10 means "poor" and 6 out 10 means "weak"; this film is mediocre in terms of originality of plot, but it's well-done, and it surely deserves better than a 6.5, so I give it a 7.
To be sure, being much like the episodes of a competently done "doctors and nurses in a hospital" television show, it does not strike one as particularly fresh in contents; but if we weren't saturated with decades of such TV shows, we would probably judge the film more leniently.
That said, I would not advise anyone to go out of the way to buy this film by itself, but it is available with 3 other films in one of the inexpensive 4-film Ealing rarities sets (PAL format, Region 2 DVD), and as one of the films in the set is the spritely romantic comedy *Young Man's Fancy* (1939) by Robert Stevenson, you get this film thrown in essentially for free, so it's a no-lose proposition to try it out.
The film has an unreasonably low rating here of 5.4 out of 10. I cannot understand this. True, as the first reviewer here states, this film is a conventional melodrama about student nurses in England in the postwar period. However, given the many positive things about the film with the reviewer concedes, the reviewer seems to rates it a little too harshly, giving it only 5 out of 10. The reviewer's concessions of quality to me make the film worth more than that. To me 5 out of 10 means "poor" and 6 out 10 means "weak"; this film is mediocre in terms of originality of plot, but it's well-done, and it surely deserves better than a 6.5, so I give it a 7.
To be sure, being much like the episodes of a competently done "doctors and nurses in a hospital" television show, it does not strike one as particularly fresh in contents; but if we weren't saturated with decades of such TV shows, we would probably judge the film more leniently.
That said, I would not advise anyone to go out of the way to buy this film by itself, but it is available with 3 other films in one of the inexpensive 4-film Ealing rarities sets (PAL format, Region 2 DVD), and as one of the films in the set is the spritely romantic comedy *Young Man's Fancy* (1939) by Robert Stevenson, you get this film thrown in essentially for free, so it's a no-lose proposition to try it out.