Don Champagne

What I like most about this tear-jerker is the last five minutes, where all the surviving characters are revealed to be flawed but very good people. One of my ten best movies of the early 1950s. Indeed, I rank it number two after "Shane".

I am 80 years old and found this to be one of the most remarkable movies I have ever seen. One of its many subtleties is that it celebrates death as a natural part of life. Set in Europe and Africa over some years from about 1950, this is the story of a polio patient and his wife before an effective polio vaccine was found. At the outset, we see polio patients being warehoused in a British hospital. They are put in cubby holes and it is shocking. The wife and husband affect his withdrawal from the hospital, of course to the chief of surgery's prediction that he will be dead within two weeks. It is not clear how long the man lived, but it obviously was vastly more than two weeks,