The Boston Phoenix
Review from issue: September 14 - 21, 2000

[Boston Film Festival]

| reviews & features | by movie | by theater | by time and neighborhood | film specials | hot links |

A Fight to the Finish: Stories of Polio

Ken Mandel's articulate documentary recalls the public hysteria surrounding the polio epidemic during the first half of the 20th century. One historian describes the times as a "massive experience in terror that stretched decades." Using archival footage, eyewitness accounts, and expert testimonials, Mandel illustrates why the virus, which affects the nervous system (children being the most susceptible) and can lead to paralysis, caused such widespread panic: it was highly communicable, so much so that public pools were closed during polio season (mid to late summer). In one case cited from a 1916 newspaper, a woman in New York City had her afflicted child taken from her at gunpoint.

The film's title is a paraphrase from Franklin D. Roosevelt's mandate to find a cure for infantile paralysis. Roosevelt himself was a victim of the virus, having contracted it at a later age in life, when the results are more physically debilitating. Fight to the Finish is at its most riveting when it explores Roosevelt's struggle to overcome, and to conceal, his handicap. The segments highlighting the race to find a vaccine and the usage of the iron lung as a form of treatment are likewise engrossing, even if Fight does at times lapse into pedantry. Screens Friday, September 15 at 7:30 and 10 p.m. and Saturday, September 16 at 12:30, 3, and 5 p.m.

-- Tom Meek

Film Festival Feature Films

| A Fight to the Finish: Stories of Polio | A Man is Mostly Water | A Trial in Prague | Blessed Art Thou | Charming Billy | Enemies of Laughter | Enlightenment Guaranteed | The Exorcist | Harry, He's Here to Help | Into the Arms of Strangers | Just Looking | Ratcatcher | Seven Girlfriends | Two Family House | The Yards | You Can Count On Me |


[Movies Footer]