This strange film isn't exactly good, but I enjoyed it. It's one of those prestige pics from decades past that make you wonder exactly what all the fuss was about. It's got a hell of a pedigree: the novel by Sinclair Lewis won the Pulitzer Prize when it was published in 1925, and Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930. It was directed by John Ford, already the director of over 70 movies, who would go on to create so many cinematic myths of American history in later films. Writer Sidney Howard would go on to win an Oscar for writing Gone with the Wind. Ronald Colman was a hot product who would end up winning an Oscar in the great A Double Life in 1947. Costar Helen Hayes won an Oscar the same year this film came out. Etc. Despite this pedigree, the film is often slow, often disjointed, sometimes hilariously overacted; it is also sometimes surprisingly touching and exciting.

Ronald Colman plays Martin Arrowsmith, a precocious young man who wants to be a great research scientist. The film does not get off to a good start. In the first pedantic scenes, we are lectured by his father and then his mentor about the values of studying and the rigors of science. The scene showing him as a teenager approaching his mentor is particularly amusing: they wanted to use Colman's distinctive voice, but they didn't want to show his 40-year-old face, so they had him stand with his back to the camera. He quickly earns his MD and turns into a dashing and impetuous genius. He informs Leora (Helen Hayes), a young nurse, that she will marry him, and she's so taken by his charms that she agrees. They journey to South Dakota so he can support her as a country doctor, but it doesn't start off well: his first patient dies. Despite this, he thrives, and he gets his chance to play scientist when the local cows come down with "black leg," which he cures with a serum he cooks on Leora's stove. He proves its effectiveness with a randomized controlled trial, and he is rewarded with a position at the exclusive McGurk Institute in New York City, working with his old mentor, Professor Gottlieb (A.E. Anson). At the Institute, he founders, unable to get any quality research done. It looks for a while that he discovers some antibacterial thing that cures all disease (I wasn't really clear what was going on with that), but it turns out that he was mistaken. He gets his big chance when the bubonic plague breaks out in the West Indies, and he's sent in with his proposed cure.

One of the most interesting things about this film for me was its portrait of ethics in the 1920s and 1930s, partly because I recently researched and wrote an article about different types of research models for work. Arrowsmith's faith in science is tested when he's sent to the West Indies to test a serum on victims of the bubonic plague. In the name of science, he's required to do a randomized controlled trial (RTC), in which half of his subjects are given the serum and half are denied. He's called an inhuman brute, and the accusations are sort of correct, at least by today's standards. There are many cases where intervention studies such as RTCs are not the best analytical framework. In a case like that presented in the film, where the researcher is nearly positive that his serum will work and absolutely positive that people will die without it, an RTC is inhumane and unnecessary. There are plenty of people around to put in your control group: all the people who died before you started administering your serum. In this film, Arrowsmith comes around to an ethical point of view, but not before untold misery unfolds. And he thinks of himself as a failure, even though the world hails his achievement: "I did not add to knowledge. I did the humane thing, and lost sight of science." He talks as if that were a bad thing.

There was an enigmatic couple of scenes involving Myrna Loy as an American trapped in the West Indies by the quarantine. I'm pretty sure the filmmakers were trying to imply that something sexual happens between her and Arrowsmith. It takes a careful reading of 1930s Hollywood shorthand. When the two meet, they hold each others' gaze for an uncomfortable minute. When Arrowsmith has to stay with Loy and her host, there's a scene where she's getting ready for bed, and she holds a sexy nightie up to her chest. There's a cut to Colman also preparing for bed, and he looks down at the space under the door, where light from her room is pouring in. He can see her shadow as she prepares for bed. The scene fades to black. The next morning, he's called to the phone, and learns that he has to return to his sick wife. Loy gives him a really strange look: part hurt, part anger, part longing. It's just really odd, and I'm wondering if we're supposed to take away that something happened. That the film is so sneaky about it is no surprise: filmmakers were experts in the 1930s about implying all sorts of things without really showing it. The most obvious example is the lighting of a cigarette as a surrogate for sex. However, I think this was one of the more subtle examples.

The film was nominated for four Oscars, but failed to win: Picture, Art Direction, Writing-Adaptation, and Cinematography. The Cinematography nomination was much deserved: one of the most striking things about the film was the photography in the latter parts, after Arrowsmith travels to the West Indies. There's a beautiful shot where Leora is sick and struggling on the floor of her house, reaching her hands out toward the door and calling for Martin. There is a fog rolling past, and the lighting makes the world outside glow, perhaps like the clouds of heaven that await her. It's pretty marvelous. In fact, most of the good scenes happen after he arrives in the West Indies. There's an exciting sequence where he leads the islanders to sack warehouses containing food and burn their infected villages down; it reminded me of the mob scenes in Frankenstein. There's a difficult scene where he is forced to callously divide the villagers into two lines in his hospital tents: who gets the serum and lives, and who dies. If these scenes gave the end of the film some resonance, they weren't enough to make the rest of the film interesting.