Director William Dieterle had guided Paul Muni to his most excellent screen portrayal to date with The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935), the film which garnered the legendary actor his only Academy Award. To cash in on the success of the film, Warner Brothers---who had produced Pasteur---decided to produce an immediate follow-up biopic involving the life of a medical expert. For some unexplainable reason, they chose Florence Nightingale.


The selected heroine was a great choice, of course, but perhaps it was too late to produce a lavish biopic on the life of the lady with a lamp who survived the Crimean War---one of the bloodiest in the history. The Production Code Administration had given Warner Brothers the green light on the project, but informed them that no violence could be shown on the screen.

As a result, Florence Nightingale’s perseverance through the Crimea was seen strictly in the medical hospitals where she treated her patients, and the offices of the generals who second-guessed her.

Newspaper ads printed in December, 1935, read about Kay’s casting in Angel of Mercy, her “greatest picture for Warners.” Originally, Josephine Hutchinson had been promised the part, and was not to happy when Kay was given the lead and star treatment. But, as Jack and Harry Warner made quite clear, Kay was their top box office star, and Angel of Mercy was to be a very important picture.

Production began March 2, 1936 and concluded on April 22. Producer Hal B. Wallis recognized the film as a potential disaster from the beginning. “I felt [Dieterle] should have gotten more emotion from Kay Francis,” Wallis later remembered. “In scene after scene, reacting to the sight of the injured, or clashing with an official who refused to see things her way, she looked completely blank. We weren’t too happy with the picture. The White Angel was well-directed, but miscast, and Kay Francis lost the box office she once had. It was one of our box office failures."

Retitled The White Angel, the film received mixed reviews and a sour commercial reception, though it was not the box office flop history has exaggerated it to be, particularly with a gross of $1,416,000.

But in the years following The White Angel, and even before, Florence Nightingale’s life has never been produced with stunning results. There are some---like Marie Antoinette or Joan of Arc---whose lives can be told repeatedly. Then there are others whose can not.