The Girl in White

Emily Dunning wants to study medicine and does. Then she wants to work as an ambulance surgeon at a hospital in New York, and hits a wall. At a time when women doctors in the operating theatre were still unusual, riding out on the ambulance was considered unthinkable. She is accepted anyway, and starts. The subject is not success but being tested without end. What stands in Emily's way is not open hostility but having to prove her competence again and again. The film's best passage is the scene in which a patient refuses to be treated by her. The form belongs to the studio biography of its period: steady pace, explanatory scenes, a romantic subplot. The ambulance sequences are staged to give a sense of the real street. The source is Emily Dunning Barringer's own memoir; she was the first woman to serve as an ambulance surgeon in New York. The details that look most exaggerated in the film are the ones on record. John Sturges directs, early work by a filmmaker who would later be known for large-scale action. June Allyson plays Emily, with Arthur Kennedy and Gary Merrill as her colleagues. Who it is for: viewers who like classical Hollywood biography drawn from real lives. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a hard account of what women doctors faced; the film softens the conflict and pushes the romance forward.