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The All-Cancer Film FestivalA patient in chemotherapy surveys the genre.

By Gary Sperling
Posted Monday, May 20, 2002, at 2:31 PM ET

When I began chemotherapy, the idea of an all-cancer film festival seemed—if not entirely natural, then not entirely sick and wrong either. I had hoped that watching these films would be a way of sharing in the communal cancer experience without having to do something drastic, like actually meeting other sick people. As an added bonus, videos go perfectly with the fetal position on the couch that's been such a comfort of late.


In Life as a House, treatment's not even an option
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Watching cancer movies, like being a character in one, affords an opportunity to learn many lessons. The first cancer-themed film was probably 1948's An Act of Murder. Frederic March plays a judge who contemplates mercy killing when his wife gets a brain tumor. (It's referred to obliquely as a "fatal ailment.") The film established the prototype for the basic cancer movie plot: A protagonist learns a Valuable Lesson through exposure to the suffering of a loved one. (This "loved one" model includes such later weepers as Love Story, Brian's Song, and One True Thing.) Sometimes, it's the patient himself who needs to do the lesson-learning. This is the case in Akira Kurosawa's classic Ikiru (To Live) (a local bureaucrat shakes off the ennui that's rendered him lifeless); My Life (Michael Keaton lets go of his anger while he makes a video for his unborn child); Life as a House (Kevin Kline rebuilds a house and some relationships); and a mawkish variety of others.


Wit: How are you feeling today?
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Not surprisingly, verisimilitude has never been a highly prized feature of the genre. In An Act of Murder, the victim's symptoms are confined to a broad grimace and clutch of the head, accompanied by a dramatic music sting. The marginally biographical The Babe Ruth Story, in which William Bendix rubs his neck a few times before collapsing at Yankee Stadium, was released the same year. The Babe's doctors don't mention throat cancer by name, choosing instead to use an array of baseball metaphors to tell him that the game's over. In Love Story, when Ali McGraw is lying in the hospital, purportedly at death's door, she looks no less fetching than she did skipping through Cambridge, Mass., tossing out witty ripostes at Ryan O'Neal like "Bullshit, preppy!" Granted, Emma Thompson in Wit and Meryl Streep in One True Thing look ill, but in Life as a House, Kevin Kline scampers over his new roof, somehow managing to make every joint plumb and straight despite terminal cancer and heavy narcotics.

What's stranger is that cancer movies have failed to absorb the ubiquitous self-help literature that comes along with the disease. (Search "cancer" on Amazon.com, and get ready to wade through over 8,000 listings, many of which boil down to "Take control of your illness" and "Ask questions.") This is understandable in the early films, made when a doctor's authority was sacrosanct, but it's odd in an era of patient activism. In Stepmom, Susan Sarandon plays a former Manhattan book editor, the kind of woman who'd spend weeks researching which long-distance carrier to use, not to mention where to send her kids to school. Yet when her oncologist recommends chemotherapy, Susan doesn't say a word. In Life as a House, Kevin Kline's reaction to his (unstated, off-screen) diagnosis is even more extreme. "Nobody's even pretended to offer treatment," he laments. No need to look for a second opinion, it's off to Home Depot. (The doctors in these movies aren't much better. If Love Story teaches that love means never having to say you're sorry, being a cancer-movie doctor means always having to say you're sorry, as in "I'm sorry. I wish there was something we could do.")

None of the movies comes close to conveying what it's like to live with the disease. Again, this is understandable in the early films, when cancer was a word that people whispered under their breath. For example, in 1950's No Sad Songs for Me, a mom goes to the doctor expecting to find out that she's pregnant and instead hears, "I'm sorry, etc." For the rest of the movie, she hides the truth from her family and friends. However, even as the culture of the disease has evolved to include cancer workshops, cancer greeting cards, and cancer fashion tips, the victims in these films remain oddly isolated. In not one cancer movie that I watched was a sick person asked something as basic as "How's it going?" thereby eliciting an insightful anecdote or a response befitting the surreal intensity of suffering from cancer.


The tears of Endearment
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All of that said, not every cancer movie is an affront. Kurosowa's Ikiru is a brilliant study of a man trapped in a stultifying municipal bureaucracy who discovers he has stomach cancer and becomes determined to create a park before he dies. Cleo From 5 to 7 follows a singer as she flits around Paris awaiting the results of a biopsy, seeing omens and portents everywhere. The French New Wave style is still fresh, as is the snappy dialogue. ("Don't say you're ill. Men hate illness.") Terms of Endearment, a much-loved movie that was loathed by my callow 25-year-old self, played much differently 19 years later. In contrast with all the cheesy films that show suffering leads to redemption, the movie recognizes that suffering isn't ultimately about anything. That only heightens the tragedy. And when Debra Winger says goodbye to her kids? Not a dry eye on my couch. (Another sentimental choice is Brian's Song, for the moment when a pre-Lando Calrissian Billy Dee Williams chokes out, "I love Brian Piccolo." What guy doesn't mist up?) The recent Wit, featuring Emma Thompson as a controlled, hyperarticulate English professor who softens as she faces her illness, is a compelling character study.

Terms of Endearment, Brian's Song, and Wit typify something else about cancer movies: Virtually nobody makes it. Yet, according to the American Cancer Society, the five-year survival rate for all cancers is 62 percent, and for many individual types, the odds are even better. Clearly then, these movies are not really about cancer. The disease is just a convenient stand-in for impending death. A factual portrayal of the ill person's odds would only confuse the issue.

With all due respect to my cancer-movie counterparts, I plan to stick around. I'd better: If it turns out that these are my waning days and I blew two hours watching Stepmom, I am going to be pissed.

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Gary Sperling is a writer at Walt Disney Television Animation. He is living with Stage 4 lung cancer.
Clips from: Life as a House © 2001 New Line Productions Inc.; Wit © 2001 Home Box Office; Terms of Endearment © 1983 Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.
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Notes From The Fray Editor:

There were a number of further recommendations, including Dying Young, The Shootist, God Said Ha!, and Dark Victory, while Temaj looked at diabetes movies. There were some personal experiences: Neal T. Lesh described his fight with prostate cancer; while breast cancer survivor Susan concluded that she didn't want tougher movies: "If the only hope we have is what's in the movies, can't we at least have that?"


Reader Comments From The Fray:

Is Alien a cancer movie? Science fiction is allowed to tell the truth, and I believe that Alien was the only truthful cancer movie. For that reason, it is the most honest euthanasia movie too. There is nothing ennobling about this horrible monster that keeps jumping out of your chest (the final place for metastasis) after you thought he was gone. And the best way to deal with it, as it rushes to devour you at the end, is by killing yourself and the monster along with you. Yes, Ripley managed to survive--but she never stood in judgment on the people who committed suicide to avoid being devoured.

--Cassandra

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This one is radiation therapy rather than chemo but I highly recommend the 1985 BBC production, C. S. Lewis through the Shadowlands with Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom playing the leads. (Not to be confused with the 1993 Anthony Hopkins/Debra Winger version, which has higher production values but is less satisfying in the end.)

O.K., the cancer victim dies here too, though this is based on the actual lives and marriage of Oxford/Cambridge professor and author C. S. Lewis and Jewish-American poet Joy Gresham. But every line sparkles with intelligence and emotional honesty. The collision of confirmed bachelorhood, late blooming love, academia, Anglo-American culture, bone cancer, Christian faith, and bereavement is carried off magnificently. Also great is the spot-on portrayal of fraternal mumbling and carrying on, in both adult (Lewis and his brother, Warnie) and juvenile (Joy's two boys) versions. It's occasionally broadcast on PBS. If you rent or buy it make sure you get the full 90-minute version and not the 73-minute version (which edits out the scenes of Lewis smoking and drinking).

For more, check out Lewis' classic reflection on grief and loss, A Grief Observed, from which the movie repeatedly quotes. "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear..."

--Russell Yee

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


As someone who has spent quite a bit of time in the last two years in hospital and cancer clinic waiting rooms the idea of a doctor going through the experience of a cancer patient is very appealing--The Doctor with William Hurt was a favorite because I have been amazed by how many mistakes doctors, nurses, and hospitals make with cancer patients.

--kc

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It's not quite accurate to say that cancer is a stand-in for death. Cancer, after all, is only one kind of fatal illness, and is one of at least three varieties of death that have created a genre. Tuberculosis, a/k/a "consumption" has both a literary and filmic history of its own. Now there is, of course, AIDS.

--J&C's Christopher

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