| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3 | The History Cooperative

Movie Review

Miss Evers' Boys. Dir. by Joseph Sargent. HBO Video, 1997. 118 mins.

This is a fictionalized movie from a play drawn from a historian's account of an experience that was all too real. Between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) studied over 400 black men with latent syphilis and 201 controls in and around Tuskegee, Alabama. The men, however, thought they were being treated, not just observed, for their "bad blood." The study achieved iconic status in the scientific research communities and generated several historical books, documentary videos, plays, jazz music, poems, a presidential apology three months after this film first aired, and a legacy of memory and fear. 1

The video is based upon the playwright-physician David Feldshuh's 1989 play of the same name, which borrowed some of its facts and language from the historian James Jones's 1981 book Bad Blood. It uses Feldshuh's literary device of focusing upon the moral dilemmas of the African American nurse, Miss Evers (Alfre Woodard) who served as the intermediary between the men and the PHS. It flashes between her testimony at a Senate hearing and the unfolding events. To add more drama, the nurse's closeness to the men develops through a tender romance with one of the study's subjects (Laurence Fishburne), in her trips to local juke joints to watch them perform in a group named after her, and in her efforts to provide care even when she knows they are not being treated. . . .

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