I always assumed polio, the country having just gone through a dozen years or so of FDR's polio. Didn't FDR visit Warm Springs, Georgia, originally in an effort to find a cure or a treatment for his own infantile paralysis? I believe he (FDR) subsequently founded the Institute at Warm Springs as a treatment center for other polio sufferers. All of this would have been well known at the time of the movie's release and implicit (at least to me) in Danny's situation. Also, I had a close childhood friend who had survived a bout of polio and he went on to be a star football player at our high school (with a very slight limp that only a few of us knew the reason for). So I think there were different levels of severity and different levels of rehabilitation. I think Thorne fell victim to that old movie bugaboo 'too much footage' and the resolution to his character's fate ended up on the cutting room floor, as they say. Evil vs. mentally ill poses rather a profound moral question considering this is, after all, a melodrama. In 1945, the inclination to call her 'evil', and take some personal satisfaction from taking the morally superior position over this evil wretch, would be more likely, I think, than it would be today. I don't think the concept of mental health was all that widespread in the mid-forties. I think the popular culture was still seeing largely good/bad, right/wrong, etc. They weren't yet looking for nuanced explanations or underlying causes.
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jreedha
11 years ago
I quite agree with mryeson - Having Danny go to Warm Springs would have been instantly recognized by the audience as tantamount to saying Danny had polio because of FDR's association with the Springs.
Polio could result in the gamut of outcomes from full recovery to being a quadriplegic dependent on an iron lung(an early respirator)for life.
And I also agree that when the film was made the concepts of good and evil were much more cut and dried than today. If people did bad things they were bad people and God would punish them. Good people were good. The notion that complex psychological influences could shape a personality for good or ill complicated the task of assigning responsibility and blame.
These influences were often recognized, but didn't have much currency to the general public. Audiences liked their moral dilemmas neatly packaged and a moral universe that was dependable and easy to understand. Of course the Noir genre of which this film is an early example, was about to turn all of that upside down.
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paul-987
10 years ago
An audience in 1945 would have instantly connected Warm Springs to FDR and polio. And remember that the official story told to the public at that time was that FDR had had polio and had some paralysis but had recovered his ability to walk at Warm Springs -- everyone took pains to hide from the public the fact that he couldn't really walk. Danny was just trying to follow the same course that FDR was popularly thought to have followed.
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