I learned about this film on Memorial Day 2020 and I felt compelled to share a few thoughts about the plight of some of our aging vets in our modern healthcare system. While I wouldn't go so far as the reviewer who dismissed this film out-of-hand as a "propaganda piece", I would say a follow-up on our aging vets, were it made today, should shed the rose-colored glasses and offer a candid glimpse of what they are up against. I work for a phone captioning service for the hard-of-hearing (primarily the elderly) and, although being disabled and never having served in the military myself, I have gotten quite a vicarious education captioning vets' phone calls into our Veterans Administration medical centers. For every "happy ending" like those experienced by the psych patients in this film, there are many more vets whose ailments remain under- or untreated in an increasingly complex healthcare system as many of the vets' calls I transcribe attest. One such call recently that I had a few weeks ago still haunts me in which an embittered vet who had seen dead bodies piled up on the Berlin wall after it was first built while he was stationed there, now years later had to seek out a patient's advocate (to whom this phone call was made) because he was being passed around from doctor to doctor, getting prescriptions he couldn't use or was allergic to, getting leg braces sent to him in the mail that didn't fit, and desperately needing therapies which weren't always well-administered or which he was unable to get altogether - all while meanwhile having not having any one medical professional taking ownership of his case, following up, or tracking his progress on his journey to wellness This 1946 film needs a modern counterpart that speaks the unvarnished truth and tells the stories of our forgotten war vets who nowadays find themselves navigating with trembling hands and voices a healthcare system with its often impersonal bureaucracy and bewildering array of Telehealth phone options while trying to get a hold of a live human being (e.g. "speaking into your phone or using your touchstone keypad, please enter the top number of your blood pressure reading.. bottom number.. date and time of your reading with two digits for the month.. I'm sorry I didn't get that. Let's try this another way.. etc, etc." Really?!!) If it weren't for the internet, such a candid contemporary documentary likely wouldn't see the light of day for decades either if indeed it could even be made at all.
Review of Let There Be Light
