The White Angel

Another attempt by Hollywood to re-create a famous life, this follows the conventions of the genre in its humorless, arid approach, sanctifying its subject in the dullest possible way. The efforts of one brave, bullheaded woman to bring sterile conditions to the wounded during the Crimean War of the mid-19th century, against the entrenched policies of the military-medical bureaucracy, might have been of interest save for the sterility of the script and direction. Francis is miscast as the Saint of Scutari, and the twisted history presented in the screenplay is little more than laughable in this bowdlerization of Strachey's biography. Worth seeing only for the coter...