Arrowsmith (1931)
NOT to be confused with the band who has the freakin' awesome Rock 'n' Roller Coaster!!!
God give me clear eyes and freedom from haste.
Arrowsmith (1931) - watched 8/16/24
Director: John Ford
Writer: Sidney Howard
Starring: Ronald Colman, Helen Hayes, Richard Bennett, Myrna Loy
Available to watch on Tubi, The Roku Channel
First Time Watch? Yes
The fifth Academy Awards came with the first handful of major shake-ups in a few years—some category changes and a lot of firsts when it came to winners and nominations. This year would see the highest number of Best Picture nominees so far, with a total of eight.1 This was also the first year that short films were recognized, and technically the first animated film category, with the introduction of “Best Short Film, Cartoon.” This category would bring Walt Disney his first of 22 competitive Academy Award wins,2 and the first film in color to win an Oscar.
This year also saw the first tie in any category—both Fredric March and Wallace Beery won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Technically, Beery lost to March by one vote, but Academy rules at the time stated that if the two top nominees came within three votes of each other, both would receive the award. This rule has since been changed, and there has only been one other tie3 in an acting category ever since—we’ll get to that infamous event in, oh, about 36 years.
A few other notable milestones this year:
Grand Hotel became the first of five films (so far) to win Best Picture without also receiving a Best Director nomination. This wouldn’t happen again until 1989’s Driving Miss Daisy.
This was the first time in which multiple films had more nominations than the Best Picture winner. In this case, those films were Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with 3 nominations, and The Guardsman with 2 nominations.
This was the last year (so far) that no film won more than two Academy Awards
So, a pretty eventful year for our beautiful golden boy Oscar. Surely this means that we’re in for some exciting Best Picture nominees, right?
Brother, I wish.
The last milestone that this year of the Academy Awards hit? It had the first Best Picture nominee so far to make me fall asleep mid-way through the movie. If Arrowsmith is setting any kind of standard here, I’m bummed to report that it’s an extremely low one.
God give me anger against all pretense
Martin Arrowsmith (Ronald Colman) is an ambitious, young, idealistic medical student, who wants to study under a renowned bacteriologist, Dr. Gottlieb (A.E. Anson). Deemed not yet ready to be Gottlieb’s apprentice, Arrowsmith continues his studies, eventually meeting and falling in love with a nurse, Leora (Helen Hayes). After graduation, Gottlieb offers Arrowsmith a job as his research assistant, but Arrowsmith declines, opting instead to marry Leora and move with her to South Dakota to work as the sole doctor in her rural home town.
We see Arrowsmith face multiple hardships and successes as the only doctor in town, but he’s ultimately bored and frustrated in this position. He dabbles in animal medicine when a patient comes to him with a problem—his cows are dying from a mysterious illness, and the state veterinarian hasn’t been helpful. Arrowsmith successfully treats the cows with a serum he develops, and this discovery inspires Arrowsmith to join Gottlieb in New York as a research scientist.
While researching in New York, Arrowsmith once again develops a promising disease-killing serum (this man just fuckin LOVES developing serums). He is sent to the West Indies to continue his research with the serum and study its use on the people there who are in the midst of a plague. Despite Arrowsmith’s protest, Leora (who, by the way, had a miscarriage and has since dedicated her life to her husband and his career) joins him in the West Indies.
Gottlieb has instructed Arrowsmith to employ the scientific method while testing the vaccine, by administering the real serum to half of the population, and giving a placebo injection to the other. Appalled by the suggestion of this, the government does not allow Arrowsmith to move forward. To get around this, a local doctor suggests that Arrowsmith instead experiment with the vaccine in a remote community on a nearby island. During this study, Arrowsmith has an affair with a stranded New York socialite (Myrna Loy) seeking out the vaccine, while Leora stays behind and waits for her husband.
The epidemic rages on in the West Indies, and one of Arrowsmith’s colleagues falls ill. As he’s dying, he pleads with Arrowsmith to abandon scientific protocol and administer the serum to as many people as possible in order to save lives. Finally showing some concern for his wife and her well being, Arrowsmith races home, but he’s too late—Leora has also succumbed to the disease. Arrowsmith gives out the vaccine to all, effectively saving the people of the West Indies from further needless death.
Back in New York, Gottlieb has had a stroke and is close to dying. Without his mentor, or his wife, and having lost his faith in the medical community, Arrowsmith resigns and joins a former colleague who has plans to start his own independent laboratory. Arrowsmith is visited once again by the socialite, hoping to rekindle their affair, but he rejects her, intent on focusing his full attention on his career.
God keep me looking for my own mistakes.
Do you like biopics? I don’t! With a few rare exceptions, I find biopics to usually be too boring, fairly un-cinematic, and often too saccharine and cheesy, usually providing the audience with a watered-down, easy to digest version of its subject.
When I first turned on Arrowsmith, I went in with no prior knowledge of the film (I’m trying to do that as much as I can for this project) and so when it began, I could already feel my eyelids drooping, my constitution weakening as I was subjected to every minute detail of Martin Arrowsmith’s life, damn near from birth. Here we go, I thought. Another dry, straightforward biopic about some boring man who did some boring stuff, talking about boring scientific things.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned that this abysmally paced, incredibly dry film wasn’t a biopic at all, but rather an adaptation of a novel by Sinclair Lewis. Huh! I don’t know, it seems weird to have spent so much time on the fairly irrelevant and very stale backstory of this fictional character. Maybe his life reads as more interesting in the novel (don’t care enough to find out, tbh) but much of the first half of this movie could have easily been left on the cutting room floor.
The movie really doesn’t become compelling until the Arrowsmiths move to the West Indies, and even though the latter half of the movie was infinitely more interesting than the first, I’m still not sure it worked well enough to save the story. The discovery of a potentially revolutionary vaccine, the ethics of testing a vaccine on a community in the throes of an epidemic, bureaucracy in the medical field, and the compulsion to bury yourself in work while grieving and dealing with trauma, are all far more interesting concepts, and deserving of more time and exploration, instead of just how some guy became a doctor. The second half ended up feeling rushed and less impactful than it could have been because we wasted so much time getting to know Arrowsmith in ways that didn’t ultimately matter.
I think our collective proximity to the COVID-19 pandemic (which is still a thing! by the way!) is also making me wish this film’s story and message had been more focused. As it stands, I don’t think it even has much of a message. Maybe I’m too idealistic and probably giving classic film too much credit in influencing modern opinions, but this movie had an opportunity to become something great, something that took a hard stand, something that had the ability to influence, but that opportunity feels squandered.
John Ford, of course, goes on to direct many great films, several of which will win him Academy Awards, but Arrowsmith was a rare miss. I struggle to find anything favorable to say about it—the performances didn’t blow me away, the writing was flat, and it wasn’t a particularly cinematic film. I’m hoping that Ford’s next Best Picture nominee, The Informer, will give me more positives to highlight.
God keep me at it till my results are proven. God give me strength not to trust to God.
Quick Facts:
Nominated for 4 Academy Awards, won none
Best Picture
Best Adaptation (Sidney Howard)
Best Art Direction (Richard Day)
Best Cinematography (Ray June)
This movie was honestly so boring there are barely any fun facts about it
Stray Observations:
When Leora tells Martin “You’re gonna love South Dakota.” What a wild assumption to make.
Very funny almost-fight scene
Did men in this era always use pet names for women? So frequently?
I want better for Leora! Once again, I want better for these women characters!!!
Snoooooooooze!
My Rating: ⭐️⭐️
Next Up: Bad Girl (1931)
This will be expanded yet again the following year, totalling 10 Best Picture nominees. The Academy will continue to nominate 10 films for Best Picture until 1944, when they whittle the number back down to five. They bump it back up to a maximum of 10 nominees in 2009, and we’ve been steadily nominating 10 films for Best Picture ever since.
Disney won a total of 26 Academy Awards over the course of his career. He received an additional Honorary Academy Award this same year for the creation of Mickey Mouse.