I meant to review “Arrowsmith,” John Ford’s 1931 film based on Sinclair Lewis’s (1926) Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an idealistic medical researcher on Lewis’s birthday— (he was born Feb. 7, 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota in a house across the street from his boyhood home, which is the one open to the public).
What is interesting now about this early “talking picture”?
One of the interesting aspects is the appearance of a black professional man, the Howard University-trained physician Oliver Marchand portrayed by Clarence Brooks. The visiting expert, Doctor Martin Arrowsmith (Ronald Colman), treats him as a peer and, indeed, allies himself with the black doctor in opposition to the white colonial doctors and the British administrators of the unspecified Caribbean location. Nothing registered on my finely-tuned condescension meter in Dr. Marchand’s role.
Colman’s voice and delivery are always a pleasure to hear, though it is impossible to believe that he grew up and learned to talk (as Dr. Arrowsmith… and Lewis did) in Minnesota. He’s also too debonair (debonairness seems innate to Colman, not acquired or grown into!) for the part.
It’s also interesting to see the young Helen Hayes, in the year she won her first Oscar and the year before her most memorable film (“A Farewell to Arms”). Her accent is not as distant from Minnesota as Colman’s and her part is close to monotone: total devotion mixed with winces at being ignored by a research-fixated husband. Although the part is underwritten, it’s not hard to see why Hayes did not become a movie star. The camera does not particularly love her, and she had not yet learned to mug outrageously as she did decades later in “Airport” (for which she won a second Oscar) and turns as Miss Marple and one of the Snoop Sisters
The sequence of scenes set on Caribbean islands during an outbreak of the bubonic plague is the most dramatic and visually striking part of the film. Cinematographer Ray June (Night Must Fall, The Great Ziegfeld, Funny Face) was one of three nominees for that year’s Oscars (the award to “Shanghai Express” is hard to challenge). Both the photography of the suffering islanders and of the high-tech (1931-style) research complex in Manhattan are breathtaking. The latter art deco sets got Richard Day nominated for an Oscar. Those in “Metropolis” spring to mind, but Day had a larger budget.
That “Arrowsmith” was directed by John Ford is enough to make the film of interest to auterists, and there are ford leitmotifs, particularly self-sacrifice. Ford focused on heroic physicians several times, including Warner Baxter fighting cholera at Fort Jefferson in “The Prisoner of Shark Island” and Anne Bancroft fight cholera in China in his last film, “Seven Women” (and one might add Jack Warden’s physician devotes to Polynesian islanders in “Donovan’s Reef”).
And the source material is interesting. In addition to winning a Pulitzer Prize (which Lewis refused), Arrowsmith was a major component of the Swedish Academy making Lewis the first American to win a Nobel Prize for Literature (1930; he accepted that honor). It has its satiric elements, but is primarily a tribute to medical research (by the son of a small-town physician). I read the novel in junior high (and in Minnesota), so am not going to make the usual “the book’s better” claim. I know that the whole second marriage was lopped off, but since I did not remember the plague-combating, it seems very likely that the film did the Caribbean interlude better.
Oh, yes, the story—with plot spoilers
While attending a provincial second-rate medical school, Martin Arrowsmith discovers a vocation for research, though discouraged from a career by the cranky old scientist Professor Gottlieb (A.E. Anson), though in typical Ford fashion, Gottlieb considers Arrowsmith a surrogate son. Arrowsmith marries a nurse, Leora (Helen Hayes), and tries to establish a private medical practice in a North Dakota backwater (is that redundant? are there front waters in North Dakota? even the Red River…).
Demonstrating experimental methods, Arrowsmith has success with cows, which brings conflict with the state agricultural vet agent. After a visiting lecture (in Minneapolis) by a Swedish (I think) researcher, Sondelius (Richard Bennett), Arrowsmith goes to Manhattan to work at a well-appointed laboratory in an art deco skyscraper, sponsored by Gottlieb.
Plague breaks out in the Caribbean, and Arrowsmith takes a serum he has developed to test there. The ethics of placebo-trial research get debated, but not the testing of drugs on colonized people. Mrs. Arrowsmith insists on going along to the Caribbean, but not to the island where her husband goes with his serum. She contracts the plague in a manner so ludicrous that it makes me reconsider the wisdom of the injunction “Show, don’t tell.”
Chagrined—or maybe grief-stricken—by her death, Arrowsmith throws experimental procedure away and injects the untested serum into everyone… including a young and -eighth billed Myrna Loy whose desire for him is not masked as it would have been by censorship later on.
She follows him to New York, where Arrowsmith is so outraged by the publicity machine of the research institute that he quits and is going off with another research to set up a lab in the Vermont woods, untouched by avarice, publicity, etc. The movie ends without trying to portray such a utopia or giving Ms. Loy the opportunity to be a more interesting wife than Ms. Hayes was.
What is bad
Sidney Howard, who had won a Pulitzer Prize (in drama, for “They Knew What They Wanted” in 1925), wrote a theatrical version of Lewis’s Dodsworth and then adapted it for the screen, and wrote the screenplay for Ronald Colman’s triumph in/as “Raffles” and “Bulldog Drummond,” was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay. I’m not sure all the blame for the lack of flow of the story is his, but he must get the blame for the clunky dialogue. What is dramatic is visual, and I’d credit to Ford, June, and Day.
Blame for the cliché of a devoted wife role can be shared between Lewis, Ford, and Howard.
The casting of Colman and Hayes as Minnesotans is not as bizarre as casting Katharine Hepburn as a Chinese peasant or John Wayne as Genghis Khan, but it does undercut plausibility. (Points should be awarded for the casting of Clarence Brooks as a forerunner to Sidney Poitier’s physician roles.)
The political satire has been excised, at least that of American politicians (the British colonial officials are more villainous than satirized).
Conclusion: The first half of the movie is uninspired and unengaging, but talky exposition eventually gives way to cinema in the New York and Caribbean settings.
© 2003, Stephen O. Murray
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