This very solid movie is a recreation of the Tukseegee experiments, in which a group of African American men were lied to about receiving treatment for syphilis, and were simply allowed to die from the disease as a part of a government "study" even though a completely effective treatment (simple penicillin) had been found early on.
There's a good performance here from Alfre Woodward as Eunice Evers, the compassionate nurse who signs on to help with the treatment program and then, after the funding for the program runs out, stays with the program once it becomes a study of how the men will fare without treatment. She gets caught up in the lie, insisting to the end that something worthwhile had come out of this experiment, but throughout the movie has definite moral qualms about this which are overcome by her desire to care for the men who are dying of the disease.
It's a very sad fact that this is a true story. It's treated as a flashback, as Miss Evers testifies before a U.S. Senate Committee hearing on the experiment. The study apparently ran for forty years (beginning in 1932) and most of the afflicted men died without receiving any treatment for the disease. The closing captions tell us that the survivors and the families of those who died received financial compensation of ridiculously small amounts, and that it was not until 1997 that the United States Government (through President Clinton) actually apologized for what had been done. This is a very sad movie almost the whole way through - certainly not one that will lift your spirits, but it's an important movie about something that should never have been allowed to happen in the first place.
There's a good performance here from Alfre Woodward as Eunice Evers, the compassionate nurse who signs on to help with the treatment program and then, after the funding for the program runs out, stays with the program once it becomes a study of how the men will fare without treatment. She gets caught up in the lie, insisting to the end that something worthwhile had come out of this experiment, but throughout the movie has definite moral qualms about this which are overcome by her desire to care for the men who are dying of the disease.
It's a very sad fact that this is a true story. It's treated as a flashback, as Miss Evers testifies before a U.S. Senate Committee hearing on the experiment. The study apparently ran for forty years (beginning in 1932) and most of the afflicted men died without receiving any treatment for the disease. The closing captions tell us that the survivors and the families of those who died received financial compensation of ridiculously small amounts, and that it was not until 1997 that the United States Government (through President Clinton) actually apologized for what had been done. This is a very sad movie almost the whole way through - certainly not one that will lift your spirits, but it's an important movie about something that should never have been allowed to happen in the first place.