The Citadel

After completing his training, Andrew Manson starts working as an apprentice doctor in a Welsh mining town. After resuscitating an apparently still-born baby, and helping to blow up a decaying sewage system that caused a typhoid epidemic, he moves to the neighbouring mining town of Aberalaw, where he becomes the colliery doctor. But he makes enemies with his research into black lung disease, and he and his wife Christine end up moving to London. After a rough start, he eventually joins the ranks of fashionable doctors treating the very rich. It is not until a good friend of his from Wales dies that he begins to examine his life … The film was based on the bestselling autobiographical novel by A. J. Cronin. But King Vidor’s first directing venture in Europe throws an even more intense spotlight on the discrepancies between the miserable sanitary conditions of the Welsh working class and the luxury of London’s high society, highlighting the glaring extremes in Britain’s class system. Made by MGM British at Denham Studios and on location, The Citadel became an exemplar for the social realism of British post-war cinema.