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Powerful

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Pretty draggy screen version of Sinclair Lewis's sensational novel about a small-town doctor who must navigate the murky place between contributing to scientific truth and helping people get better.Ronald Colman plays Arrowsmith as well as he can, though his dandified diction and general European air were at odds with my image of the character. The film feels truncated and half baked, not surprising since it condenses a meaty novel into about 100 minutes. "Arrowsmith" was nominated for four Oscars in the 1931-32 award year, and actually tied with "The Champ" for the most nominated film of the year (can you believe there was a time when the most nominated film would only have 4 nominations?). But it lost all of them, and honestly it didn't really deserve to win any of them. The only one I might be able to argue for is Richard Day's art direction, which takes the story from small midwestern farm houses to the tropics of the West Indies. Its other three nominations included Best Picture (in a year that saw eight nominees in this category), Best Writing (Adaptation), and Best Cinematography.John Ford, who directed, shows none of the style and stateliness he would bring to his later career.Grade: B-

The student of medical school Martin Arrowsmith (Ronald Colman) dreams on becoming a researcher. He seeks out Professor Max Gottlieb (A.E. Anson) that promises the position when Arrowsmith is an undergraduate doctor. Meanwhile Arrowsmith meets the nurse Leora (Helen Hayes) and they fall in love with each other. When Prof. Gottlieb invites Arrowsmith to work with him in New York, he declines since the salary is not enough to support Leora and him. He marries Leora and becomes a countryside doctor. After a while, the frustrated Arrowsmith decides to move with Leora to New York to work with Gottlieb. Soon he is invited to go to a Caribbean Island where there is an outbreak of bubonic plague to test a serum he has developed in the population and Leora decides to go with him despite the danger. Will Arrowsmith succeed in saving the inhabitants? "Arrowsmith" is a deceptive film directed by John Ford. The story seems to be incomplete missing explanation, for example, about Mrs. Joyce Lanyon, performed by the gorgeous Myrna Loy. The relationship between Arrowsmith and his wife is also underdeveloped. Ronald Colman is too old for the role of a young idealistic doctor. Maybe the viewer that has read the novel may like this film more than one that has never read it. Last but not the least, the Brazilian title is awful. My vote is five.Title (Brazil): "Médico e Amante" ("Doctor and Lover")

This review is actually more about the novel on which this movie is based than on the movie itself. Normally, that is not the way to review a movie. However, the movie is better than the novel, because there is an absurd event that is described in the novel that the movie wisely, or perhaps fortuitously, left out. For better or worse, I will discuss that event.In the novel, Martin Arrowsmith becomes engaged to a woman named Madeleine. During the summer, Martin goes Canada, where he meet a nurse named Leora, proposes to her, and she accepts. But Martin is still not sure which woman he wants to marry. So, he invites both of them to have lunch with him, and when they arrive, he announces that he is engaged to both of them, and he will let them decide whom he will marry. Madeleine leaves in a huff, but Leora stays and cinches the engagement.When I reached this point in the novel, I threw it aside in disgust. It was one of the stupidest things I had ever read, especially in a well-known novel by an otherwise good author. I had no interest in reading a novel about a man who is that ridiculous. I would say the same about Leora, since any self-respecting woman would do what Madeleine did, which is to get up and leave. But some women are just desperate to get married, and that might explain her willingness to marry Martin, the lunch date notwithstanding. It was the better part of a year before I could bring myself to finish the novel.Years later, the movie turned up on television, and I remember wondering to myself how the movie was going to handle this business with the two women. I was pleased to see that the Madeleine character was not in the movie, thereby eliminating the scene that caused me to despise the novel. As for the rest of the story, Martin is interested in medical research. In testing a new medicine, the standard procedure is to have a control group that gets a placebo to compare with the group that gets the experimental medicine. That way the researchers can tell whether the medicine makes a difference, and whether there are side effects. This is especially emphasized in the novel, where the students are portrayed as being obsessed with controls.When the bubonic plague hits the West Indies, Martin decides to go there and try out his new serum. This requires the use of a control group. But if the serum is effective, this will mean that most of those in the control group will die on account of having only received a placebo. He ends up giving the serum to everyone. Martin's humanity triumphs over his desire to establish the efficacy of the serum.As the movie came to an end, I suddenly realized the point of the lunch date with two fiancées. Madeleine was essentially acting as a control for Leora. By comparing Madeleine's reaction with Leora's, Martin was able to assess Leora's love for him by contrasting it with Madeleine's. The idea was to show just how obsessed Martin was with the need for controls, that he would even try to apply it to love and marriage.That may have been the idea, but it is still absurd. And it is unnecessary. A man will typically have enough experience with women in general to be able to decide whether he should marry one woman in particular. Every woman he has ever dated is a control or sorts. Likewise, a woman will have had enough experience with men to know that if a man she is engaged to turns out to also be engaged to someone else, she should run, not walk, to the nearest exit.It may be that Sidney Howard, the man who wrote the screenplay, left Madeleine out of the movie for the simple reason that most movie versions leave stuff out that was in the novel. But I like to believe that Howard thought the lunch date with the two fiancées was as preposterous as I did, and he mercifully gave it the ax.

I was very confused. What happened to the Doctor on the telephone line? What happened between Mr. Colman and Ms. Loy? I guess this is a case where less is not more. (So, a scene with Colman resisting Loy's advances, and she respecting him for it, was cut?)The acting is a collision of three types: Stage, Silent, and Talking. Some of the camera work was nice... most everything else was way below what you'd expect from even an early talking movie.The doctors in these early films sure drink and smoke a lot... The moral of the story, I guess is that women should not smoke - witness what happens to poor Ms. Hayes! *** Arrowsmith (12/7/31) John Ford ~ Ronald Colman, Helen Hayes, Myrna Loy