Shining Victory

United States

1941

80 Min

Black and White

1.37:1

English

Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
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SCR Howard Koch, Anne Froelich, A. J. Cronin

CAST James Stephenson, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Donald Crisp, Barbara O'Neil, Montagu Love, Sig Ruman, G.P. Huntley, Richard Ainley, Bruce Lester, Leonard Mudie, Doris Lloyd, Frank Reicher, Hermine Sterler, Billy Bevan, Clare Verdera, Crauford Kent, Alec Craig, Bette Davis

A brilliant research psychiatrist, Dr. Paul Venner, is driven out of Budapest by another researcher who has taken false credit for Venner’s work. After going to London, Dr. Venner is offered a job in a Scottish sanitarium where he can continue his research on dementia precox, a disease from which his father had suffered.

Mary Murray, a young, pretty doctor, becomes his laboratory assistant. They fall in love, though she has plans to go to China to engage in medical missionary work in a year’s time. Paul convinces her to remain with him, and the two become betrothed. A fire breaks out in the lab and Mary tragically dies in an effort to salvage Paul’s valuable records. The deeply distressed doctor turns down several posts at prestigious universities in order to realize Mary’s dream of helping the sick in China. —Wikipedia

Director

Irving Rapper

Irving Rapper (16 January 1898 – 20 December 1999) was a British film director. His most successful body of work is 10 films he made while under contract with Warner Brothers.

Rapper emigrated to the United States and became an actor and stage director on Broadway while studying at New York University. In 1936, he went to Hollywood, where he was hired by Warner Bros. as an assistant director and dialogue coach. He proved invaluable in translating and mediating for non-native English-speaking directors. By the early 1940s, he had metamorphosed into the one of the hottest directors on the Warner Bros. lot.

He made his directing debut with the 1941 film Shining Victory, in which his friend Bette Davis appeared as a show of support for him. He would go on to direct her in four more films, Now, Voyager (1942), The Corn Is Green (1945), Deception (1946), and Another Man’s Poison (1952). In later years, Rapper admitted that he found Davis very difficult to work with and that… read more