These biographies of scientists and other notables of the past, made in the 1930s, often by Warners, are almost always enjoyable as well as instructive. Oh, the life stories are generally polished and simplified but sometimes we really don't want or need a more complex portrait. "Lawrence of Arabia" was pretty challenging but activated all our critical faculties. That's work.
Louis Pasteur, Paul Muni here, believed in the germ theory of disease at a time when the French Academy didn't. According to this movie, they believed in spontaneous generation -- that organisms emerged whole from suitable environments. Speaking from a position of expert ignorance, I recall from a course in microbiology that the notion of spontaneous generation had already been dispelled by F. Redi and Lazzaro Spallanzani. Yet, here we have the Academy believing that mosquito larvae grew out of stagnant water by themselves. I think, though, that Pasteur more or less applied the germ theory by developing vaccines that conclusively wrapped up the issue.
The script adopts the usual pattern. Nobody believes in what Pasteur is doing -- discovering why wine went sour, trying to cure anthrax and rabies and puerperal (or childbirth) fever. I'd thought most of the credit for the last was due to Ignaz Semmelweis, who noticed that more women died in childbirth while in the hospital than at home. In his facility, doctors went directly from practicing on cadavers to aiding in childbirth -- without washing their hands. Semmelweis was an interesting guy who only get a brief mention, once, early in the film. He also invented a crude stethoscope so that the doctor didn't need to press his ear directly on a woman's, er, bosom. Like many other innovators, including Pasteur, Semmelweis was ridiculed and eventually wound up in a mental facility.
But that's off track. Despite doubts and ridicule, Pasteur, his ideas and his methods, prevailed. Surprisingly, there is no mention of "pasteurization." Joseph Lister ("Listerine") appears briefly.
What a time it was -- the last half of the 19th century, with a scientific revolution going on. Not just Pasteur, Semmelweis, and Lister, but Koch, Fleming, and Edward Jenner (who found a vaccine for smallpox). Freud was born in 1856, three years before Darwin publish "The Origin of Species." Paul Muni is good as the impatient Louis Pasteur who receives his just honors at the end. He's often criticized for overacting, attributed to his origins in the Yiddish theater. I don't find him at all outrageous and often extremely effective. I was an usher in the Yiddish theater for a while. Now THAT'S overacting! The rest of the cast is professionally competent. There are better examples of the genre -- Edward G. Robinson in "Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet", for instance. But this occupies a respectable place in the genre.
Louis Pasteur, Paul Muni here, believed in the germ theory of disease at a time when the French Academy didn't. According to this movie, they believed in spontaneous generation -- that organisms emerged whole from suitable environments. Speaking from a position of expert ignorance, I recall from a course in microbiology that the notion of spontaneous generation had already been dispelled by F. Redi and Lazzaro Spallanzani. Yet, here we have the Academy believing that mosquito larvae grew out of stagnant water by themselves. I think, though, that Pasteur more or less applied the germ theory by developing vaccines that conclusively wrapped up the issue.
The script adopts the usual pattern. Nobody believes in what Pasteur is doing -- discovering why wine went sour, trying to cure anthrax and rabies and puerperal (or childbirth) fever. I'd thought most of the credit for the last was due to Ignaz Semmelweis, who noticed that more women died in childbirth while in the hospital than at home. In his facility, doctors went directly from practicing on cadavers to aiding in childbirth -- without washing their hands. Semmelweis was an interesting guy who only get a brief mention, once, early in the film. He also invented a crude stethoscope so that the doctor didn't need to press his ear directly on a woman's, er, bosom. Like many other innovators, including Pasteur, Semmelweis was ridiculed and eventually wound up in a mental facility.
But that's off track. Despite doubts and ridicule, Pasteur, his ideas and his methods, prevailed. Surprisingly, there is no mention of "pasteurization." Joseph Lister ("Listerine") appears briefly.
What a time it was -- the last half of the 19th century, with a scientific revolution going on. Not just Pasteur, Semmelweis, and Lister, but Koch, Fleming, and Edward Jenner (who found a vaccine for smallpox). Freud was born in 1856, three years before Darwin publish "The Origin of Species." Paul Muni is good as the impatient Louis Pasteur who receives his just honors at the end. He's often criticized for overacting, attributed to his origins in the Yiddish theater. I don't find him at all outrageous and often extremely effective. I was an usher in the Yiddish theater for a while. Now THAT'S overacting! The rest of the cast is professionally competent. There are better examples of the genre -- Edward G. Robinson in "Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet", for instance. But this occupies a respectable place in the genre.