NFR Project: 'The Forgotten Frontier' (1931)

NFR Project: ‘The Forgotten Frontier’

Dir: (Mary) Marvin Breckinridge Patterson

Scr: (Mary) Marvin Breckinridge Patterson

Pho: (Mary) Marvin Breckinridge Patterson

Ed: (Mary) Marvin Breckinridge Patterson

Premiere: 1931

59 min.

This fascinating effort is a dramatic reconstruction of life in the back of beyond and a documentation of an early comprehensive health system.

The Frontier Nursing Service was founded in 1925 by nurse-midwife Mary Breckinridge. Its goal was to provide health services to the unserved populations of deeply rural Kentucky. Breckinridge was born to affluence, and after the death of a husband and two children, she dedicated herself to help the health of low-income children and families.

She studied nursing and midwifery extensively in Europe, and surveyed rural health services in Scotland. She served as an administrator of the American Committee for Devasted France in the wake of World War I. She drew up a model of a new service – a decentralized, independent organization of nurse-midwives living far out in the country, making rounds that could only be navigated on horseback, providing pre-natal care, obstetric service, and pediatric care as well.

This was unheard of. The people the Frontier Nursing Service served were back in the deepest hollows of the mountains, desperately poor, subject to a lack of basic hygiene. Breckinridge ran the Service until her death in 1965. In that time, the service saw 58,000 patients, and delivered more than 14,500 children.

Her work inspired her cousin, Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson. Patterson was also well-off, and began a career as a photojournalist. Soon she was working with movie cameras. She went to work for her cousin and, largely self-taught, she began to film the activities of the Frontier Nursing Service.

The film is a documentary, but it is a staged documentary. Patterson filmed, silently, the nurse-midwives as they saddled up, crossed rivers, went up and down gullies – improbable feats of hardiness. The film is split into several parts. In the first, a child is brought into the world. In the second, the nurses convince the local children to submit to inoculation. They take in orphaned twins.

Most extraordinary is the treatment of a gunshot victim. Sixteen miles from the nearest hospital, the patient is carried on an improvised stretcher by shifts of volunteers. A surgeon, also on horseback, makes his way to the remote outpost and operates – successfully.

The film’s style is very straightforward, but there are moments of beauty – peeks down into mountain valleys, sweeping pans across broad rivers. The project is simply a way of illustrating the work of the Service, obviously useful to view when soliciting financial contributions to the program. (Many donors are mentioned in the title cards.) The difficulty of the nurse-midwives’ circumstances are underlined, but the tone of the film is ultimately upbeat. Where there was no medical care, suddenly there is a system in place that looks to establish and maintain a basic level of public health.

Patterson released the film as Marvin Breckinridge, presumably due to the perceived prejudice against women filmmakers. She went to a career as a photojournalist, and became the first female news broadcaster to report from Europe during World War II.

Mary Breckinridge continued her work for decades. Her record is only marred by evidence of her strong racism.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Frankenstein.