In the early 1950s, the “fight” for a way to prevent polio became a “race” as panic grew over yearly summertime polio epidemics. In 1955, the vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk became available to the public, and thousands upon thousands of people brought their children to be vaccinated. That this was a new and largely untried serum, the public’s leap of faith had to be enormous. Even greater was their fear of this horrific illness.
Knowing all that, it seems strange that there were not more movies with polio treatment as a subject. When one considers other dreaded elements of the stressful post-war life that became fodder for many films, such as the fear of communism, the lurid explorations of mental illness, and flying saucers, why was there not more examination in the movies of the greatest medical story of the day? Not addressing the treatment of polio and the frantic search for a vaccine in the years in which it was so rampant and so frightening, to me is like cranking out a slew of movies during the early 1940s and hardly mentioning World War II.
Perhaps it was because polio was even scarier to most people than foreign enemies, or aliens from another planet. Perhaps that was less fearsome than going to a public pool one day,
developing a fever that night, and ending up in an iron lung in a matter of days.
Some movies did address the topic, like Sister Kenny (1946) with Rosalind Russell – a biography of the Australian nurse who developed her own methods of therapy for polio victims. Other films included characters who were afflicted with polio, but their struggle was not the focus of the plot, such as Roughly Speaking (1945), also with Rosalind Russell, in which one of her children in the film had polio and wore leg braces as a child, improving to using a cane as an adult. But she was only one member of a large family and her story was not the central one.
The suspense drama Leave Her to Heaven (1945) had Darryl Hickman as Cornel Wilde's younger brother, determined to overcome his polio. The sinister Gene Tierney had other plans, and the plot was really about her evil machinations.
The Five Pennies (1959) with Danny Kaye and Barbara Bel Geddes is the story of real-life cornet player Red Nichols. His daughter contracts polio. As a teenager she is played by Tuesday Weld.
Interrupted Melody (1955) was about real-life Australian opera singer, Marjorie Lawrence, whose career ended when she got polio.
Perhaps the most striking drama I can recall involving polio as a plot element was not a movie, but an episode in the old Loretta Young Show on television, called “Earthquake,” originally aired in October 1953. In this episode, Loretta plays the wife of a man who must stay in an iron lung at home because his polio has left him unable to breathe on his own. Set in a southern California town, when an earthquake occurs in the middle of the night and the electricity goes off, Loretta must manually pump the machine and massage her paralyzed husband’s chest for hours until help arrives.
Many people did recover from polio to varying degrees, but many did not. Though polio has been eradicated in most countries today, thanks to Dr. Salk and to Dr. Albert Sabin, there is still no cure. A news story from 2008 about a woman in an iron lung who, like the character in the Loretta Young Show, faced calamity when her home lost power, and she died. She had been living in an iron lung for 50 years, since childhood.
Possibly the most famous polio victim was, of course, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at various times tried to hide his physical limitations, leading to a bit of controversy when his memorial statue in Washington, D.C., did not openly depict him in his wheelchair. Elements in the design were later changed to suggest his wheelchair beneath his cloak. Sunrise at Campobello (1960) dealt with his challenges with this disease.
Actress Helen Hayes lost her 19-year-old daughter, Mary, to polio, and thereafter dedicated herself to the cause.
We live today in an era where we have both a generation with a living memory of the fear of the disease when vaccination proved to be a blessing, and a younger generation which is turning towards not vaccinating children, leading to present, and future, health crises.
Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star., and several other non-fiction books on history and classic films, as well as novels. www.JacquelineTLynch.com.