Documentary portrait of two professional nannies, both born in the first years of the century, both without children of their own, but in other ways quite unalike: Martha, the German Catholic, trained as a baby nurse, and a rigid disciplinarian by temperament and philosophy (preferred instrument of enforcement: the wooden spoon), who emigrated to America early in the Second World War, whereupon she embarked on a thirty-year hitch with the Johnstone family; and Ethel, the South Carolina black, who migrated north and, with no formal training and an easygoing, outgoing disposition, eventually in the Fifties took a place in the Ettinger household, in which she still carries on as a companion to the divorced matriarch ("Mrs. Ettinger, you see, you're good-natured. And I'm better"), long after the chicks have flown the coop. Jyll Johnstone, one of Martha's charges, is the director and co-producer of the film; Barbara Ettinger, one of Ethel's, is its other co-producer. Much of the manner of presentation is no more than workaday, workmanlike journalism: talking-head interviews dressed out with old family photos (and their inherently poignant contrast) and archival film footage (some of it fictional in origin: a clip from Maedchen in Uniform to illustrate the tradition of Teutonic starchiness, another from All about Eve to dramatize the position of women in society circa 1950). But the growth of the subject matter, the broadening of the scope, is organic and unforced: from child-rearing strictly considered, to the definition of family, to the values of society at large, to the changing role of women therein. Quite a spread. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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