First of three Waxwork Prestige Bio-Pics from Warners, all directed by William Dieterle and (in various disguises) starring Paul Muni. (The later two, on EMILE ZOLA/’37 and JUAREZ/’39, were three or four reels more prestigious.) Disparaged by modern critics as ‘films to make the industry proud,’ they actually hold up pretty well as simplified Great Man stories and as lively entertainments.* (The second half of ZOLA, basically THE DREYFUS AFFAIR, really hangs together, and JUAREZ is fascinating . . . whenever Muni’s Juarez isn’t around!) This one is lightest on its feet, with the least complicated storyline: Pasteur fights the French Scientific Bureaucracy to prove germs/microbes cause disease. Oddly, pasteurized milk (developed from early work in beer & wine) never comes into it. For dramatic purposes they drop his youthful efforts to save the silk industry (work done when his theories were rated crackpot pseudo-science) and substitute from decades later research involving sheep and an anthrax vaccine (lambs being so much cuter than silkworms) when he was well-established in his field. Then, hydrophobia for a final act, which proves a tougher nut to crack and has the script neatly pulling his family and his main nemesis into the story arc. A late Roberto Rossellini teaching film it ain’t . . . and thank goodness for that, even if some elements now look creaky and overstated.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: It’s a Bio-Pic Rule of thumb that the single most unbelievable story beat is also one of the truest. Here, it comes up when adorable child actor Dickie Moore, bitten by a rabid dog, makes an emergency call needing Pasteur’s as yet untested hydrophobia antidote. Experiment on a child? Yet the incident is true.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Those science-denying members of the French Academy once looked like too easy a target. These days, with politicians denying science right & left, perhaps not so far-fetched.
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