User Reviews

Just saw this film on TCM the other night and found the facts of the story quite moving. The key points were well re-enacted and the story moved right along keeping my attention the entire time.

Told in the manner of its day, the scenes were re-enacted without dialogue but with an "enthusiastic" narrator voice over and "stirring" music. Yes, today the style appears laughably dated and overzealous but still the story is well told and eminently watchable if allowance is made for this.

The director of this film went on to such classics as "High Noon (1952)", "From Here to Eternity (1953)" and "Day of the Jackal, The (1973)" but its films such as this that he learned his craft.

Any serious film student should see this.

This episode of John Nesbitt's THE PASSING PARADE covers the best known work of Dr. Joseph Goldberger, a Hungarian-born physician who worked for the US government. It was he who identified pellagra as being diet-related; today we would note that it is caused by a lack of niacin (vitamin B3), a common enough part of fresh meat, milk and vegetables. Given a poverty diet of salt pork and grits, though, and even the strongest will wither and die.

Nesbitt over-dramatizes Goldberger's struggles, but it makes a good episode of the series.

With almost Biblical intensity, a courageous doctor searches for the cure for a disease which ravaged the South in the years before 1920.

This short film memorably profiles Dr. Joseph Goldberger (1874-1929) and his conquest of the scourge pellagra. Shepperd Strudwick plays the good doctor. The extracts from newsreel footage woven into the narrative give the story historical authenticity. (To be technically specific, the missing protein substance which caused the dietary deficiency was niacin, and was identified after Goldberger's death.)

Directed by Fred Zinnemann, this was part of the MGM series John Nesbitt's Passing Parade, and was narrated by Mr. Nesbitt. Movie mavens will recognize an unbilled Bill Wolfe, W. C. Fields' buddy, appearing for a few moments as a hungry, destitute man.

Often overlooked or neglected today, the one and two-reel short subjects were useful to the Studios as important training grounds for new or burgeoning talents, both in front & behind the camera. The dynamics for creating a successful short subject was completely different from that of a feature length film, something akin to writing a topnotch short story rather than a novel. Economical to produce in terms of both budget & schedule and capable of portraying a wide range of material, short subjects were the perfect complement to the Studios' feature films.

The mysterious disease Pellagra strikes hundreds of thousands of Americans dead, mainly in the Southern United States, at the turn of the century. Dr. Joseph Goldberger (played by Shepperd Strudwick), a Jewish immigrant, suspects the illness may be connected to nutrition. Mr. Goldberger's experiments, which include feeding Northern prisoners a Southern diet, are criticized as "torture" - but, Goldberger safely identifies the cause and cure for Pellagra. This episode of narrator John Nesbitt's "Passing Parade" is bracketed with Isaiah 44:19, "Behold, I will do a new thing - I will even make a way in the wilderness." Notable for Mr. Strudwick's convincing performance, and its director.

**** Passing Parade: A Way in the Wilderness (6/22/40) Fred Zinnemann ~ Shepperd Strudwick, John Nesbitt, Edward Hearn

Way in the Wilderness, A (1940)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Fred Zinnemann directed short about Dr. Joseph Goldberger, an immigrant who found the cure for pellagra while other doctors fought him thinking he was wrong. These docudrama shorts are among my favorites and this here is one of the better films. The film does a great job telling the story of the disease and how it was treated and only takes 11-minutes in doing so. Zinnemann does a very good job with the story and gets some nice drama out as well.

If you're interested in seeing this film then keep your eyes on Turner Classic Movies.