Arrowsmith
by John Ford
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: A.E. Anson, Clarence Brooks, Helen Hayes, Richard Bennett, Ronald ColmanDirector: John Ford
Brand: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
Cinematographer: Ray June
Producer: John Ford
Editor: Hugh Bennett
Producer: Arthur Hornblow Jr.
Producer: Samuel Goldwyn
Writer: Sidney Howard
Writer: Sinclair Lewis
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); Italian (Original Language); Swedish (Original Language); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 108 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-03-08
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: United Artists
Movie Reviews of Arrowsmith
Movie Review: Style Sans Substance
Summary: 3 Stars
In ARROWSMITH, director John Ford tries mightily to bring to life the novel by Sinclair Lewis about the eternal struggle between idealism and pragmatism. In this, Ford fails to bring to life the memorable drama that is on every page of Lewis' novel. The fault is not Ronald Coleman's as the physician who always places people over profit. Rather it is the herky-jerky script that shifts the setting from one sharply contrasting scene to another with neither believability nor seamless segue. Coleman plays Dr. Martin Arrowsmith right from the start as one who wishes to study medicine so as to become a researcher to find cures for All That Ails Mankind. Fair enough. But no sooner does he say that than he is quite willing to become a country doctor in Montana far from any lab. He brings with him his wife (Helen Hayes), a nurse whom he proposes to on the first date. In short order, he finds a cure for a cattle plague before deciding to move to New York to find work as a researcher in a fancy Upper East Side facility. In the novel, Lewis pictures this facility in the bitterest terms as all that he saw as wrong with modern medicine. Such doctors, Lewis viewed as mercenary and any results of research had to have an immediate payoff. In the film, Ford at least got this right as the facility's publicity director had no problem with labeling a prototype of a serum of Arrowsmith's as a universal panacea.
Most of the movie gives snippets of Arrowsmith's life from country doctor to medical researcher to caring physician in plague torn West Indies. The audience sees clearly enough what happens to Arrowsmith but fails to feel an empathy even during moments of tragedy. When his wife loses her baby, Coleman is strangely detached from the reality of the loss. When she dies of plague in the West Indies, Coleman shows even less feeling as he can do no more than place her lifeless body on the nearest bed. And then there is the Myrna Loy character as Joyce, a recent widow whom Arrowsmith meets in the West Indies. In the novel, they marry only to learn that the idealistic Arrowsmith has no place in the glitzy world of Upper East Side doctoring. In the film, director Ford introduces her clearly as a romantic complication, perhaps to test the fidelity of the true blue Arrowsmith. However, their relation never progresses beyond that of the passing acquaintance. Ultimately, ARROWSMITH is a film that with a tighter script might have emerged as an engaging indictment of the money hungry medical profession. Instead, the indictment fizzles out as what might have been but wasn't.
Summary of Arrowsmith
The legendary John Ford directs this provocative and acclaimed film based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Sinclair Lewis and adapted by Sidney Howard. Country doctor Martin Arrowsmith (Ronald Colman) is idealistic, hardworking and happily married to Leora (Helen Hayes). He's also about to make a terrible mistake. Lured away from his small practice by the prospect of wealth and important medical research, he takes a position with New York City's esteemed McGurk Institute. It's a big opportunitybut it brings bigger problems. The intense workload, a romance-minded socialite (MyrnaLoy) and a terrible plague outbreak are about to threaten everything Martin holds dear.One of John Ford's earliest talkies, Arrowsmith demonstrates the director's underrated knack for contemporary drama. Adapted (by acclaimed screenwriter Sidney Howard) from the novel by Sinclair Lewis, the film is a prestigious vehicle for Ronald Colman in the title role of Martin Arrowsmith, a promising physician whose research ambitions are curtailed when he improbably marries the adoring but comparably dim-witted nurse Leora (Helen Hayes), who relocates him to her South Dakota home and convinces him to be a country doctor. Unchallenged and unhappy, he readily accepts an offer to battle bubonic plague in the British West Indies, where he encounters both triumph and tragedy. Creaky logic and primitive sound quality don't stop Ford from crafting some still-impressive sequences (the island sequences prepared Ford for 1937's The Hurricane), and the theme of marriage-vs.-career remains timelessly relevant. Though not as powerful as the Lewis-based Dodsworth (1936), Arrowsmith is that later film's worthy companion. --Jeff Shannon
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