Something the Lord Made (2004)
Joseph Sargent's 2004 HBO film. Alan Rickman as Dr. Alfred Blalock, Mos Def as Vivien Thomas.
Director: Joseph Sargent
Joseph Sargent worked mostly in television across five decades and won four Emmy Awards, and his best cinema work has the economy that career produced. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is lean, funny and unbearably tense, built almost entirely on radio conversation between two men who never meet until the end.
Something the Lord Made, made for television, is a genuinely moving account of the surgical partnership between Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas.
He also made Jaws: The Revenge, which he discussed openly and unsentimentally as a job.
