Arrowsmith

John Ford directed Arrowsmith for release in 1931.  It's an elaborate production, almost entirely studio-bound, and not characteristic of the work that made Ford famous.  But the film, adapting a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Sinclair Lewis is impressive, has a good cast, and was nominated for a number of Academy Awards.  It's an odd picture and seems somehow compromised by the source material -- it's obvious that Ford felt compelled to work fairly closely with his screenwriter to prepare an adaptation of the novel that would be at least, approximate to the book's plot, but the picture has strange lurches as well as interludes that lead nowhere that suggest that parts of the novel have been elided or reduced to a single gesture or shot.  (There's an inscrutable subplot involving Myrna Loy as a seductress on a Caribbean island afflicted by the plague:  we see her moping around in lingerie and observe Arrowsmith, played by Ronald Colman, apparently yearning for her, but this detour in the narration goes nowhere.)

The film begins with an image that is trademark Ford:  covered wagons crossing the prairie.  He cuts to a close-shot of a wagon driven by a doughty tough-looking tomboy.  When her ailing father suggests that they stop along the way to see some kin, the girl vetoes his suggestion and, on they go, to the promised land.  Martin Arrowsmith, the girls grandson, is said to have this pioneer resolve and independence.  At Winnemuca College, he asks to be advanced into classes taught by a great scientist and microbe-hunter, Dr. Gottlieb. (Winnemuca is Lewis' surrogate for Minnesota).  Gottlieb tells Arrowsmith to get an MD and, then, work in medical research.  With his MD in hand, Arrowsmith meets a plucky nurse who is scrubbing ward floors as punishment for smoking on the job and "being fresh."  Although Arrowsmith bullies her at first, he recognizes her gumption and they are, later, married.  For some reason, this precludes Arrowsmith from following Dr. Gottlieb, an emaciated German scholar, to the McGurk Institute in New York City -- a world-famous center of research. Arrowsmith's wife, played by the very annoying Helen Hayes, is from South Dakota and so the hero goes to her hometown to work as a country doctor for a few years.  Leora (as the wife is named) gets pregnant but miscarries.  Arrowsmith loses his first patient to diphtheria.  Later, as a lark, he invents a serum vaccine that cures "Black Leg" disease in dairy herds.  His experiment requires that he immunize one half of the herd but let the other half die -- something that appalls the local farmers until the cure is available.  On the strength of this work, Arrowsmith and wife move to New York and he  joins the McGurk Institute, housed in impressive offices with mighty foyer, forty-foot high bronze doors, and a reception room that is all terrazzo tile for the length of a football field.  At the Institute, he is reunited with Dr. Gottlieb.  After two years of continuous work, Arrowsmith discovers some sort of anti-bacterial agent and is about to become famous as a benefactor of humanity when it is learned that a French researcher has beat  him to the punch.  Rats spread the bubonic plague in the West Indies and Arrowsmith goes there to fight the plague.  He announces that he is going to inject half of the study population with serum vaccine but not treat the other half of the patients -- this alarms the local authorities who prohibit the study as inhumane and barbaric. But there is an African-American doctor, Dr. Marchant, watching from the balcony in the hall where Arrowsmith's proposals are rebuffed.   Marchant, an alumnus of Howard University, offers the Black population on a remote island for the study -- the Black people, in effect, become like the sacrificial cattle in South Dakota, half of them will not be treated as a control group against which to measure the success of the experimental vaccine.  (For modern audiences, this aspect of the story is shocking:  we recall that the Tuskegee syphilis experiments that were conducted in the same way on Black men.)  Arrowsmith leaves his clingy wife, Idora, back on the main island and goes to the epicenter of the plague.  His mentor, Dr. Sandulius, a Swedish microbe-hunter and valiant man of medicine, dies from the plague.  Meanwhile the plague attacks the capitol city.  Arrowsmith's wife dies -- she's been an irritant throughout the movie and so her demise is pleasing to the audience.  Poor Marchant also dies.  In his grief, Arrowsmith abandons the experiment and vaccinates everyone wholesale.  The gamble pays off and the plague is fought to a standstill.  Back in New York, Arrowsmith is feted as a champion of medical science,but he knows that he has failed Dr. Liebgott  by abandoning the control group in the experiment on the island.  It doesn't matter because Liebgott has had a stroke and his mind is destroyed.  Arrowsmith can't confess his failing to him.  With a close friend (who is obviously alcoholic), Arrowsmith departs the prestigious McGurk clinic to start his own laboratory.

Racial aspects of this movie are disturbing.  But Ford deserves credit for putting these issues in the foreground, although he's generally on the wrong side of issues of this sort.  (In most films of this era, race questions wouldn't be raised at all.)   All the doctors smoke cigarettes continuously and everyone responds to either success or disappointment by getting deliriously drunk, also an irritating feature of Ford's films.  Ford fills the screen with non-English-speakers and immigrants whom he stereotypes in various  ways:  the pedantic German doctor, the sorrowful and humble Swedish farmer, the rambunctious Italians.  The claustrophobic  studio settings are interesting and the scenes during the plague have a dream-like Expressionistic intensity:  the local people wander around like zombies in dense mist intended to conceal the fact that the jungle is made of cardboard.  Glaring light creates chiaroscuro effects in enclosed darkened rooms -- the light sprays through jalousies and mosquito nets.  In two remarkable shots, Ford films the rats in negative -- they appear as silvery apparitions scurrying across a black background. A very low-angle shot that shows Leora collapsing alone in her room on the island is harrowing and seems to foreshadow similar camera-work in Citizen Kane.  Everything looks feverish and foggy and, in this hothouse environment, the weird abortive subplot in which Dr. Arrowsmith is tempted by the sultry Myrna Loy seems almost like a delirium dream.  The film is organized into a classical five-part structure:  after an introduction (part one), the picture breaks into three extended sequences:  South Dakota practice, the McGurk institute in snowy New York City, and the febrile sequence involving the plague.  There is a short coda in which Arrowsmith, now a widower, departs the McGurk institute (which has been shown to be corrupt) to start his own research laboratory -- this plot point enabled by the disability of the incorruptible  Dr. Liebgott.  

The film has a very strange binary structure:  every plot point is presented as an either/or situation.  You can't be a research scientist if you are a newly married man.  (Why not?)  Research is inimical to medical practice.  If you are working hard, you can't sleep or eat.  Work opposes marriage.  Kind and neighborly medical practice is inconsistent with the ruthlessness of science required to end the plague.  When Leora has her miscarriage, this loss is presented within this binary system:  the loss of the child means that Idora will have no children and that the marriage will be childless.  Men are adventurers; women guardians of the household and ne'er the  twain shall meet.  Arrowsmith, in effect, sacrifices his wife to medical science.  You can be happily married or stop the plague but not both.  And most fundamentally, we have the primordial clash between Black and White -- the Black people are mere bodies upon which to be experimented; the White people are the scientists and benefactors who perform the experiments.  Given this ruthless system of binary oppositions, it's no surprise that everyone drinks to excess.  And, at the climax of the film, Arrowsmith gets drunk enough to abolish the binary system necessary to having a control with respect to his anti-plague vaccine:  he vaccinates everyone.    

Ford was drinking heavily when the film was made and the producers ultimately threatened to fire him if he continued boozing.  (He is said to have accelerated the production to get back to the bottle.)  Helen Hayes despised Ford.  The film is remote from the novel.  In Sinclair Lewis' book, Arrowsmith is a prickly serial womanizer.  He goes to school on his first wife's money, then, abandons her.  He has love affair and marries another woman.  At the end of the novel, he abandons wife and child to open a laboratory in the wilds of Vermont.  All of these aspects of the book are sanitized. Lewis' Arrowsmith is an egotistical anti-hero; Colman is the very soul of decency.  (Lewis wrote the book with the collaboration of the microbe hunter Paul de Kruif who was paid 25% of the royalties; he turned down the Pulitzer Prize awarded to him for the novel.)