Titreenp SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

MonsterPerfect Good idea lost in the noise

Married Baby Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Cody One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

museumofdave The kind of a movie they don't make any more, and probably couldn't and possibly shouldn't; being from 1931, it's fairly primitive in some ways, but has excellent production values and a prestige cast for the period--silent star Ronald Colman is perfectly suited as the dedicated doctor who wants so desperately to succeed in helping humanity, Helen Hayes poignantly overacting (as she so often did) as his patient helpmate; Colman's polished diction and English good looks convince the viewer of his sincerity in the face of institutional insensitivity, but the script based on the Sinclair Lewis novel tends to bog down in talk, attempting to please all the folks at the time who read the book. There was a time when movies did their best to build positive images of human beings doing their best, and this is one of those films--it does not date well, but is worth watching because of Colman--as a bonus, Myrna Loy gets to vamp a wee bit as "the other woman," and Ward Bond pokes his nose in as a cop.

Robert J. Maxwell Ronald Coleman is Martin Arrowsmith, a young doctor who has a talent for research but gives up that career to practice medicine in a tiny North Dakota town in order to support his new wife, Helen Hayes.He delivers babies and makes midnight house calls and all that, but he retains his research skills and they lead him to the prestigious McGurk Institute in New York. His mentor is the highly regarded medical researcher, Dr. Gottlieb, played by A. E. Anson.After some years of hard work and neglecting his wife, Coleman discovers a serum that will "kill all the bugs, exterminate them." When he learns of an outbreak of bubonic plague in the West Indies, Dr. Gottlieb urges him to visit the place with his serum and use the scientific method to determine whether it will work. The scientific method, as described here, involves splitting the population of the island in half, then giving one half the serum and withholding the serum from the other half, making comparison possible.Coleman, Hayes, and two other medical friends set up shop on a rainy tropical island where the only medicine the good residents know is voodoo. Coleman manages to save the island's population but at tremendous personal cost.The 1930s, when this appeared, was a time when movies about scientific researchers, particularly in the field of medicine, were being ground out annually. There were biographical films about, oh, I don't know -- just about everybody who was anybody. Pasteur, Koch, Erlich, and Walter Reed come to mind. Often the protagonist was faced with Coleman's dilemma: prove the serum works by being cold blooded or save the victims.Probably such biographies became so common partly because of the enormous popularity of a book about such men, written in 1926 by Paul de Kruif, "Microbe Hunters." It was a best seller for years. De Kruif was a consultant on the movie and added character sketches, although Sinclair Lewis gets the writing credit. I reread the book recently and the style is so antiquated and pompous that there's a laugh on every page.At that, I don't know how de Kruif, a microbiologist, could have let slip a couple of obvious boners. At one point, Coleman refers to bubonic plague as a "virus" when it's caused by bacteria. And he must have known that the scientific method requires an experimental group (the people who get the injections) and a control group (those who don't) but that the two groups don't have to be equal in size. You can reduce the control group to one person out of ten, thereby giving the serum to ninety percent of the population, and you can still make satisfactory comparisons between the two.You'd have a tough time knowing this was directed by John Ford. He doesn't seem to have invested that much of himself in it, but then this was 1931 and he had yet to hit his stride. There are still a few drinking scenes involving booze hidden in a trash can and so forth, and he employs some striking expressionistic effects in the photography.Ronald Coleman is nobody's idea of an American country doctor, but he looks dashing and does a controlled job of filling the role. Helen Hayes -- she's okay too. She isn't staggeringly beautiful but she has a winning voice and a face that doesn't plumb the depths of ugliness. Don't know why her movie career didn't take off. Maybe she just preferred stage work. Myrna Loy appears briefly as Coleman's sympathetic friend. She's radiantly seductive, is as wealthy as Bill Gates, and nice too. At the end, she offers to be his steady date but, instead of jumping her bones then and there on the street, he throws her away and runs off to Vermont to do research with a toothpick and a ball of string. He's going to live in a cabin in the woods with a male friend of his, where, one assumes, they will live on maple syrup and the fruits of love. And he's supposed to be smart.

calvinnme This film was actually nominated for four academy awards - cinematography, art direction, adapted screenplay, and best picture. Viewing it today, there are so many somewhat incomplete story lines and messages present, I am somewhat unclear about the director's goal in all of this. Sinclair Lewis' book, on which the film is based, goes into great detail about the tribulations and triumphs of studying to be a doctor and then practicing medicine back in the 1920's. It is just impossible to convey all that goes on in the novel in one 108 minute film. First of all, although young Dr. Arrowsmith comes across as an admirable protagonist who doesn't lose his idealism through all of his experiences, his character development and motivations are just not fleshed out in the film, and thus he is left an unintended mystery. His passion for medical research definitely shines through in Ronald Coleman's performance, but I had many unanswered questions. The film seems to imply that Arrowsmith is attracted to Myrna Loy's character through one scene in particular in the film. Was this intentional? The two have an affair in the novel, but if it is going to be omitted from the film - and it is - what was that one scene doing there? Arrowsmith talks a good game about loving his wife, but he seems to constantly overlook her in his passion to find new cures for diseases. Is he actually taking her for granted, or is this just a common attitude from the past in which wives always took a back seat to their husbands' careers? There is another whole part of the film that is quite troubling to a modern audience. When Arrowsmith is sent to the Caribbean to help fight the plague by testing his new serum, he is instructed to basically do what today is called a double blind study. He is to inject half the patients with his serum and the other half he is to treat conventionally. Thus, it can be determined whether or not the serum will be effective. When Arrowsmith presents his plan of action to the local plague-ridden residents, the shocked citizenry deny his help "in the name of humanity". However, a local black doctor, Oliver Marchand, tells Arrowsmith that he knows of how he can accomplish his goal - by experimenting on the black residents of the island of course! To me, this was all too reminiscent of the Tuskegee experiments and had a large Ick Factor to it.I can't grade this film too severely since I have to take into account its year of production, the fact that dialogue had not become that sophisticated yet since talking pictures had only been universally accepted for about two years, and finally that a complex novel is being squeezed into just over an hour and a half. This film's value today is mainly as an example of one of the better transitional era talkies. Dialogue and acting were much more natural than they had been just a year or two prior to this film, but vast improvements, particularly in dialogue and technology, were just a couple of years away.

Steffi_P Even though only around a third of John Ford's pictures are westerns, it's still undeniable that his forte or, if you prefer, his comfort zone was in historical pictures of some sort. Arrowsmith is unusual in that it is a contemporary drama that Ford both directed and co-produced.In spite of the above, you might think this was indeed a western from the opening scene, in which we see an ancestor of the protagonist as a good ol' covered wagon pioneer. This bit of family history is not brought up again, but it was obviously judged by Ford and Sam Goldwyn to be significant enough to open the film with, even though it would have been one of the most expensive scenes of the shoot (unless that opening shot is lifted from somewhere else, which it may well be). The point seems to be to draw a line between the struggles of the pioneers and the main story of a medical scientist torn between his home life and his career. It seems a rather tenuous comparison.On the other hand, there could be parallels between Dr Arrowsmith and a typical Fordian westerner. Not in the character as written – I'm no auteur theorist – but in the way Ford shoots their environments. In the majority of Ford films he exaggerates the smallness of interiors and the vastness of exteriors. The homestead is safe, yet dull, and the great outdoors is exciting yet dangerous. The village where Arrowsmith practices as a country doctor is shot in much the same way as Ford would a western settlement – cramped interiors, foreground clutter and heavy use of framing. However the medical research centre, while it may be another interior, is shot so as to show off its openness and stark cleanliness, with corridors and waiting rooms so vast they look almost surreal. This is Arrowsmith's "wild west", where he is free to be a pioneer of another sort. Another tenuous comparison? Maybe, but remember directors have many choices of how to shoot a place, regardless of the script or the set design, and these choices will reflect how they view that space and what they feel it means to the story.While Ford's use of space developed incredibly early on, the camera movement at this stage is not yet of the "invisible camera" technique that later became his standard. For those that don't know, invisible camera means you only move the camera when it's following an action, say for example a character walking to the other end of the room. If everyone in the scene is sitting still, the camera sits still. If it's done properly the audience doesn't notice the camera movement, hence "invisible camera". And yet here there is rather a lot of obtrusive camera movement. This is pretty much in line with the general style of the time, in spite of the myth that cameras were immobilised in the early sound era. Despite a few teething problems that were mostly solved by the end of 1929, cameras of the early talkies zipped around just as giddily of those of the late silents.Ford is not known to have given his actors much coaching, nor allow them rehearsals or repeated takes to hone their performance. For this reason the acting in his pictures tends to be only as good as the raw talent of the performers. Ronald Coleman and Helen Hayes were both good dramatic actors, and here they give good – but not outstanding – dramatic performances. Richard Bennett however just gives a fairly standard, slightly comical supporting-player performance as Sondelius, and the part should either have been cast differently or he should have been prompted to play it with more conviction.The story goes that the hard-drinking Ford was contracted by Goldwyn to remain teetotal until the production wrapped. Apparently Ford, eager to get back to the bottle, rushed the shooting even more than usual, tearing pages out of the script wherever he could get away with it. Whether this is true or just another bit of Ford mythology, it certainly makes sense. In particular the love story, crucial to the picture's impact, is massively underdeveloped. Downplaying the romantic angle is actually very typical of Ford, but even the usual Fordian semi-improvised comedy diversions are absent – with the exception of a couple of nice gags in a scene where a boy has his tooth pulled, and an almost surreal moment where a comedy drunk inexplicably wanders on and off the set. The resultant picture is full of great moments, but overall seems a little undernourished. Arrowsmith could have been an intense and poignant drama, but Ford was the wrong man for the job.