MADAME CURIE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 308, 18 May 1945, Page 18

MADAME CURIE

M.G.

M.

HOUGH it is perhaps not strictly my place to mention it, I feel impelled to remark that film-reviewing is not quite the easy, light-

hearted task that some people seem to think it is; not if you take it sériously. I am now settling down to write this notice on Madame Curie late at night after having prepared myself for the job by reading Eve Curie’s biography of her mother on which the film is based. (You may say that I should have read it long before this; but I hadn’t.) It took one night to see the film, three nights to read the book: and now I am wondering if all this time was well spent. The film is worth seeing by itself; to read the book is an adventure. But taken together the film and the book have thrown me into a mood which I am afraid may annoy some admirers of the picture, since it is inevitably the kind of mood in which a "delving mind" goes to wérk, burrowing for inconsistencies and blemishes in the screen product. So I want to make it quite clear that Madame Curie is a very good film, by all ordinary standards of screén entertainment. I would like everybody to see and appreciate it as such (though I know they won’t). The dissatisfaction I feel is directed less against the production itself than against the whole Hollywood method of working — the well-known procedure of spoiling a work of art by trying to improve on it. %* ae * HIS judgment again may sound harsher than is intended. Madame Curie, the film, is not a work of art, though I think the book is, but it is unquestionably a mature, soundly-acted, and responsible account of a most unusual romance between two most unusual human beings — the scientists Pierre and Marie Curie -- and their heroic, grinding struggle to discover, and uncover, radium. By Hollywood standards, indeed, their romance is not merely unusual: it is extraordinary. For ,here we see two adults whose love-making, if one can call it such, is conducted in scientific terms; who woo one another with references to "identity transformation," "symmetry in physical phenomena," and "two Pi L," and whose marriage is primarily a union of true minds, finding beauty, and strength, and calm in intellectual companionship on a most exalted level. The "scientific approach" to matrimony has been dealt with on the screen before, but mostly as a subject for comedy: here it is treated with sobriety and sensitive understanding by the director (Mervyn LeRoy) as well as by’the stars, Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. I was, I think, rather more impressed by Pidgeon’s performance than by Miss Garson’s. She gives us the determination (amounting almost to obstinacy) of Marie Curie, her scientific integrity and devotion, but there is scarcely more than a hint at the loneliness and self-abnega-tion which was fundamental in the character of the great scientist. Perhaps this is partly because the film story begins with Manya Sklodovska as a young | student in Paris and ends almost immeafter Pierre Curie’s death in a

street accident in 1906, thereby omitting the important formative years of her girlhood in Poland, as well as most of her widowhood. One cannot justifiably complain because the film does not show everything (it is already very long), but this concentration on the middle period of Marie Curie’s life means that although Miss Garson’s portrayal has surface brilliance and tenderness it is somewhat lacking in depth. On the other hand Walter Pidgeon (partially and correctly disguised behind a black beard) does rather more adequately suggest the shyness, the nobility, and the unworldliness of Pierre Curie. * * % HY, then, the dissatisfaction? "The solution to this enigma is supplied, I think, by a saying of Madamé Curie’s, a saying which "she was to repeat often as a sort of motto, which depicted character, existence, and vocation": In science we must be interested in things, not in persons. Now that confession of faith is,’ of course, diametrically opposed to all that Hollywood stands for. The cinema’s devouring interest is, and always has been, in persons and not in things-and certainly not in ideas. The whole star system is based upon this. The same is true, of course, of most other forms of entertainment, of journalism, and much of literature and art. But what the cinema in particular seldom recognises is that there is a difference between persons and personality, and that by being preoccupied with superficial details of behaviour there is a danger of obscuring true character. An instance of this occurs in Madame Curie in that sequence where Greer Garson babbles to an interviewer about her baby daughter’s darling ways, whereas this is the passage in the book where Madame Curie actually cut the interview off with that observation I have quoted about the scientist’s interest in things before persons. How much more revealing that is of Marie Curie’s real nature! : Similarly, Hollywood’s reluctance to let well alone is illustrated by making Pierre Curie’s death occur on the day on which Marie was to receive her highest honour, while he was walking home after buying her a pair of earrings to wear at the ceremony. A "human touch," not worth worrying about unduly, but symptomatic. * ® * N fact, however, the film itself makes nonsense of Hollywood’s own theory about the all-importance of persons. For quite the best part of Madame Curie is the very long sequence dealing first with the Curies’ discovery of the radioactive qualities of pitch-blende and then with their long and arduous task of isolating radium from the residue of the ore. Mervyn LeRoy’s direction here turns a complex scientific problem into entertainment as absorbing and exciting as a manhunt in a detective thriller. But it is the thing, radium, not the persons working at the retorts and containers, ‘ that keeps uis on the edges of our seats. And when finally the battle is won and the new element glows in the darkness of "the shed, it shines with a far more thrilling light than any star in the whole Hollywood firmament.