(5 of 5)
The producer, scripters and Dr. Rudolph Langer of Caltech spent months picturizing the search for radium. The sequence presented paralyzing problems, both scientific and cinematic. One of the most difficult pieces of research ever attempted had to be made understandable to an intelligent child. Long years of desperately static work had to be made dynamic, on the screen. There were temptations to visual melodrama. In the early stages of production, Mervyn LeRoy wanted Frankensteinesque sparks to swizzle from the quartz piezo-electroscope through which the Curies first got on the scent of radium. "Well," groused Dr. Langer (with success), "dramatically it would be false to science."
One proof of the picture's success is Scientist Robert Millikan's approval of the script. Another is the suspense in which, with almost no time out, a lecture-hall subject succeeds in keeping cinemaddicts for more than an hour. Highlight: the moment when at last, in the darkened laboratory, radium first manifests itself, as a strange, Grail-like glow. The special quality of this glow was tried a dozen different ways. Producer Franklin and his associates even thought of Technicolor. They talked about using real radium, found that they could not get enough, and if they did, it would not give off enough light. They finally got the effect they wanted with a complex arrangement of a lamp under a film of water.
Most of the production shows the same endless, elegant patience. In fact, Madame Curie emphatically establishes Director LeRoy in Hollywood's top drawer, and frail, modest Producer Franklin in the seven-league shoes of the late Irving Thaiberg. Almost every member of the supporting cast, from Dame May Whitty to Albert Bassermann, plays his part with pride and devotion. As Pierre Curie, Walter Pidgeon is knowingly professorial and unworldly. Greer Garson plays Marie Curie with a kind of scientific saintliness. In fact, her Madame is so ultimate an embodiment of the Ideal Woman whom she first gave to the world in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and Miss Garson demonstrates, in this difficult theorem, such limpid intersections of romance and reality, that short of the Maid of Orleans (or possibly the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg), it is hard to imagine a part that can possibly lead her further onward & upward.