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Arrowsmith |  | Director: John Ford
Actors: Ronald Colman, Helen Hayes, Richard Bennett, A.E. Anson, Clarence Brooks
Studio: United Artists
Category: DVD
List Price: $14.98
Buy New: $5.25
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New (33) Used (11) from $3.48
Rating:  15 reviews
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, Full Screen, Subtitled, NTSC
Languages: English (Original Language), Italian (Original Language), Swedish (Original Language), English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 108 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6
MPN: 1004038
UPC: 027616881458
EAN: 0027616881458
Theatrical Release Date: December 26, 1931
Release Date: March 8, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | The legendary John Ford directs this provocative and acclaimed film based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Sinclair Lewis and adapted by Sidney Howard.Country doctor Martin Arrowsmith (Ronald Colman) is idealistic, hardworking and happily married to Leora (Helen Hayes). He's also about to make a terrible mistake. Lured away from his small practice by the prospect of wealth and important |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
The legendary John Ford directs this provocative and acclaimed film based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Sinclair Lewis and adapted by Sidney Howard.Country doctor Martin Arrowsmith (Ronald Colman) is idealistic hardworking and happily married to Leora (Helen Hayes). He's also about to make a terrible mistake. Lured away from his small practice by the prospect of wealth and important medical research he takes a position with New York City's esteemed McGurk Institute. It's a big opportunity but it brings bigger problems. The intense workload a romance-minded socialite (Myrna Loy) and a terrible plague outbreak are about to threaten everything Martin holds dear.System Requirements: Running Time 99 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 027616881458 Manufacturer No: 1004038
Amazon.com
One of John Ford's earliest talkies, Arrowsmith demonstrates the director's underrated knack for contemporary drama. Adapted (by acclaimed screenwriter Sidney Howard) from the novel by Sinclair Lewis, the film is a prestigious vehicle for Ronald Colman in the title role of Martin Arrowsmith, a promising physician whose research ambitions are curtailed when he improbably marries the adoring but comparably dim-witted nurse Leora (Helen Hayes), who relocates him to her South Dakota home and convinces him to be a country doctor. Unchallenged and unhappy, he readily accepts an offer to battle bubonic plague in the British West Indies, where he encounters both triumph and tragedy. Creaky logic and primitive sound quality don't stop Ford from crafting some still-impressive sequences (the island sequences prepared Ford for 1937's The Hurricane), and the theme of marriage-vs.-career remains timelessly relevant. Though not as powerful as the Lewis-based Dodsworth (1936), Arrowsmith is that later film's worthy companion. --Jeff Shannon
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 15
Style Sans Substance May 22, 2009
Martin Asiner (Jersey City, NJ)
In ARROWSMITH, director John Ford tries mightily to bring to life the novel by Sinclair Lewis about the eternal struggle between idealism and pragmatism. In this, Ford fails to bring to life the memorable drama that is on every page of Lewis' novel. The fault is not Ronald Coleman's as the physician who always places people over profit. Rather it is the herky-jerky script that shifts the setting from one sharply contrasting scene to another with neither believability nor seamless segue. Coleman plays Dr. Martin Arrowsmith right from the start as one who wishes to study medicine so as to become a researcher to find cures for All That Ails Mankind. Fair enough. But no sooner does he say that than he is quite willing to become a country doctor in Montana far from any lab. He brings with him his wife (Helen Hayes), a nurse whom he proposes to on the first date. In short order, he finds a cure for a cattle plague before deciding to move to New York to find work as a researcher in a fancy Upper East Side facility. In the novel, Lewis pictures this facility in the bitterest terms as all that he saw as wrong with modern medicine. Such doctors, Lewis viewed as mercenary and any results of research had to have an immediate payoff. In the film, Ford at least got this right as the facility's publicity director had no problem with labeling a prototype of a serum of Arrowsmith's as a universal panacea.
Most of the movie gives snippets of Arrowsmith's life from country doctor to medical researcher to caring physician in plague torn West Indies. The audience sees clearly enough what happens to Arrowsmith but fails to feel an empathy even during moments of tragedy. When his wife loses her baby, Coleman is strangely detached from the reality of the loss. When she dies of plague in the West Indies, Coleman shows even less feeling as he can do no more than place her lifeless body on the nearest bed. And then there is the Myrna Loy character as Joyce, a recent widow whom Arrowsmith meets in the West Indies. In the novel, they marry only to learn that the idealistic Arrowsmith has no place in the glitzy world of Upper East Side doctoring. In the film, director Ford introduces her clearly as a romantic complication, perhaps to test the fidelity of the true blue Arrowsmith. However, their relation never progresses beyond that of the passing acquaintance. Ultimately, ARROWSMITH is a film that with a tighter script might have emerged as an engaging indictment of the money hungry medical profession. Instead, the indictment fizzles out as what might have been but wasn't.
The Film Simply Needs More Running Time March 7, 2009
Tsuyoshi (Kyoto, Japan)
I have a MGM video of John Ford-directed "Arrowsmith" and the liner notes on the cover read: "Named one of 1931's Ten-Best Films by The New York Times, Photoplay and Film Daily, the film was also a top box office success." The film actually got four Oscar nominations--Best Picture, Writing (Adaptation), Cinematography and Interior Decoration--but all these facts may be a little incredible to us now.
Not that the filmed adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is terrible or worthless. After all this is a John Ford movie. As I tell you later, it has a few touching moments, but still the film is very disappointing even for those who have not read the original novel. Obviously "Arrowsmith" is trying to be something - satire, romance, cautionary tale, or morality tale - but you are not sure what it really wants to be even after the film ends.
Those who have read the book will be dismayed to find the film hurriedly moves on, skipping considerable portions of the first half of the book. Unlike Lewis's novel, or expose, the film doesn't have much to say about the life in a small town in America. There is no Pickerbaugh and his doggerels. The satire is there, but it doesn't bite even by the standard when it was released.
The film quickly moves on to show the life of Dr. Martin Arrowsmith in New York City, working for prestigious McGurk Institute. (Its interior designs are pretty good.) Then, before we know anything about the publicity-minded institute and its unwritten codes, an epidemic breaks out in the Caribbean Islands. Despite its powerful scenes that ensue, the film looks too short and the ending abrupt.
There are some merits, however. Myrna Loy is effective as Mrs. Joyce Lanyon, but her role is not big. Helen Hayes (who was to win Oscar the same year for the role she played in "The Sin of Madelon Claudet") is also good as Martin's devoted wife Leora (and one moving scene set in the dark house on a Caribbean island). It must be pointed out that like Sinclair Lewis's original "Arrowsmith" the film includes a black character Oliver Marchand (Clarence Brooks), a competent and heroic doctor who supports Martin. He is not a stereotypical black character you might find in most films of the day.
Though not a total failure, "Arrowsmith" needs a better script that allows for character development. Or perhaps what it needs most is running time.
Impossible to squeeze Sinclair Lewis' book into a 1931 film March 24, 2007
calvinnme (Fredericksburg, Va)
This film was actually nominated for four academy awards - cinematography, art direction, adapted screenplay, and best picture. Viewing it today, there are so many somewhat incomplete storylines and messages present, I am somewhat unclear about the director's goal in all of this. Sinclair Lewis' book, on which the film is based, goes into great detail about the tribulations and triumphs of studying to be a doctor and then practicing medicine back in the 1920's. It is just impossible to convey all that goes on in the novel in one 108 minute film. First of all, although young Dr. Arrowsmith comes across as an admirable protagonist who doesn't lose his idealism through all of his experiences, his character development and motivations are just not fleshed out in the film, and thus he is left an unintended mystery. His passion for medical research definitely shines through in Ronald Coleman's performance, but I had many unanswered questions. The film seems to imply that Arrowsmith is attracted to Myrna Loy's character through one scene in particular in the film. Was this intentional? The two have an affair in the novel, but if it is going to be omitted from the film - and it is - what was that one scene doing there? Arrowsmith talks a good game about loving his wife, but he seems to constantly overlook her in his passion to find new cures for diseases. Is he actually taking her for granted, or is this just a common attitude from the past in which wives always took a back seat to their husbands' careers?
There is another whole part of the film that is quite troubling to a modern audience. When Arrowsmith is sent to the Caribbean to help fight the plague by testing his new serum, he is instructed to basically do what today is called a double blind study. He is to inject half the patients with his serum and the other half he is to treat conventionally. Thus, it can be determined whether or not the serum will be effective. When Arrowsmith presents his plan of action to the local plague-ridden residents, the shocked citizenry deny his help "in the name of humanity". However, a local black doctor, Oliver Marchand, tells Arrowsmith that he knows of how he can accomplish his goal - by experimenting on the black residents of the island of course! To me, this was all too reminiscent of the Tuskegee experiments and had a large Ick Factor to it.
I can't grade this film too severely since I have to take into account its year of production, the fact that dialogue had not become that sophisticated yet since talking pictures had only been universally accepted for about two years, and finally that a complex novel is being squeezed into just over an hour and a half. This film's value today is mainly as an example of one of the better transitional era talkies. Dialogue and acting were much more natural than they had been just a year or two prior to this film, but vast improvements, particularly in dialogue and technology, were just a couple of years away.
 DREADFUL DISAPPOINTMENT September 6, 2006
J. MACKENZIE (Taconic, CT USA)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I truly wanted to like this film. The cast. The director. The script. But sadly, it is dreadful. The script is a mess. The direction is hit and miss. And Ronald Colman, in the lead, turns in what must be recognized as one of his worst performances. He is not 'present' in his scenes - save for one, when Arrowsmith's wife has just died and he is drunk. He looks inebriated, with fire in his eyes, and he is actually in the moment. The rest of the film he drones on with his utterly self-conscious voice, leaving poor Helen Hayes acting to a wooden dummy. He simply isn't there.
There is splendid photography in most of the West Indian scenes. Quite stunning and worthy of freeze-framing to appreciate the composition.
Avoid this and go straight to the magnificent DODSWORTH.
early john ford is worth checking out June 4, 2006
Jonathan Lapin (Brooklyn, NY USA)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
this is the other 1930s sinclair lewis adaptation (i.e. NOT the superior "dodsworth"), and while its not in a league with "dodsworth", it is still a good movie. ronald colman (my very favorite actor) stars as a young doctor torn between career and love. i have never read the book, but my guess is alot gets left out in the telling.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 15
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