Albert Bassermann | Through the Shattered Lens

(Lisa is currently in the process of cleaning out her DVR! How long is it going to take her? Probably about as long as it took scientists to discover radiation. Still, she’s not giving up! She recorded the 1943 best picture nominee, Madame Curie, off of TCM on February 16th.)

It would appear that if you wanted to produce a best picture nominee in the early 40s, the easiest way to do it was to cast Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson as husband and wife.

Consider the evidence: In 1941, Blossoms in The Dust was nominated for best picture. Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon played wife and husband.

In 1942, Mrs. Miniver won best picture. Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon played husband and wife. Interestingly enough, Garson actually starred in another best picture nominee that year, Random Harvest. Random Harvest is a far better picture than Mrs. Miniver and actually featured a better performance from Garson but it did not include Walter Pidgeon. Make of that what you will.

Then, in 1943, Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon starred in Madame Curie. Again, they played husband and wife and, again, their film was nominated for best picture.

As you can tell from the poster above, Madame Curie was advertised as being “Mr. and Mrs. Miniver together again.” Actually, Garson and Pidgeon are playing characters far different from the stalwart and very British heroes of their previous film. Instead, they are playing the Curies, Marie and Pierre. The film opens with Pierre meeting Marie at a party and it juggles scenes of their romance with scenes of them discovering and playing with radiation. Of course, it’s a struggle at times. Their colleagues are dismissive of their efforts. Both Pierre and Marie tend to get so caught up in their research that they close themselves off from the outside world. Their efforts pay off when they isolate radium and win the 1903 Nobel Prize. Of course, then Pierre gets run over by a horse while out buying his wife a pair of earrings. Can Marie continue to do their research without him?

The unfortunate thing is that the movie pretty much ends with Marie winning her first Nobel Prize, which means that it leaves out some of the most interesting aspects of her life. For instance, during World War I, she developed mobile X-ray units and worked in field hospitals. She was also active in the struggle for Polish independence, even naming the first element that she ever discover polonium after her native country. She spent almost her entire career working with radioactive material, often carrying radioactive isotopes in her pockets. In 1934, Marie died of radiation poisoning. Her research notes and other papers are so highly radioactive that they’re kept in a lead box and I assume that they probably glow whenever the lid is shut. If you want to study Marie Curie’s notes, you have to put on a radiation suit. Unfortunately, none of this is discussed in the resolutely positive movie.

Judging from what I’ve seen on TCM, Greer Garson appears to have been the Meryl Streep of her day, undeniably talented but a bit too obvious in her technique and just a little boring. The same can be said of Madame Curie, which is a very well-made but not extremely memorable movie. It’s like a lot of the films that were nominated for best picture in the 30s and the 40s — a big, prestige picture that never exactly comes to life. The film is probably at its strongest in the beginning, when Walter Pidgeon does a pretty good job of playing Pierre as a brilliant introvert who is almost too shy to talk to Marie. But, as the film progresses, it just becomes another slow-moving MGM biopic.

What movie beat Madame Curie for Best Picture?

None other than Casablanca.

Before watching a film like 1940’s Foreign Correspondent, it helps to know a little something about history.

Nowadays, when we think about World War II, there’s a tendency to assume that, from the minute that Hitler came to power in Germany and started to invade the rest of Europe, the entire world united against the Nazis. The truth is actually far more complex. The world was still recovering from World War I and throughout the 1930s, even as the Axis powers were growing more and more aggressive, respected intellectual leaders and politicians continued to argue that peace must be maintained at all costs. Pacifism was such a popular concept that otherwise intelligent people were perfectly willing to make excuses for Hitler and Mussolini. For five years, the UK followed a policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany. Even after war broke out between Britain and Germany, the U.S. remained officially neutral. In the 1940 presidential election, President Franklin D. Roosevelt — running on a platform of neutrality — was overwhelmingly reelected over internationalist Wendell Willkie.

Foreign Correspondent, an American film made by a British director, opens before the start of World War II. An American newspaper editor, Mr. Powers (Harry Davenport), is frustrated because none of his foreign correspondents seem to be able to understand the truth of the situation in Europe. They all claim that there is going to be no war in Europe but Mr. Powers feels differently. He also feels that the newspaper’s most celebrated and respected foreign correspondents are just a bunch of out-of-touch elitists. Instead of sending another upper class academic, Mr. Powers decides to send a hard-boiled crime reporter to cover the situation in Europe. Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea) has never been to Europe and that’s exactly why Mr. Powers decides to send him. In one of the film’s more clever moments, he does, however, insist that Johnny write under the more distinguished sounding name of “Huntley Haverstock.”

(Foreign Correspondent‘s pointed criticism of out-of-touch elitists repeating the establishment line remains just as relevant today as it was in 1940.)

From the minute the brash and tough Johnny arrives in Europe, he finds himself caught up in a huge conspiracy. He’s been assigned to report on a group known as the Universal Peace Party and, since this film was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, we automatically know that any organization with the word “Peace” in its name has to be up to something shady. The Universal Peace Party has been founded by Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall), who appears to sincere in his desire to avoid war. Johnny meets and falls in love with Fisher’s daughter, Carol (Laraine Day).

From the minute that Johnny witnesses the assassination of distinguished Dutch diplomat Von Meer (Albert Bassermann), he suspects that things are not how they seem. Working with Carol and a British journalist named Scott ffolliot* (delightfully played by the great George Sanders), Johnny discovers that Von Meer was not killed at all. Instead, a double was assassinated and Von Meer was kidnapped by a group of spies.

But who are the spies? After nearly getting killed by one of Fisher’s bodyguards, Johnny starts to suspect that Stephen Fisher might not be as into world peace as was originally assumed. Complicating matters, however, is the fact that Johnny is now engaged to marry Carol…

Foreign Correspondent is a wonderfully witty thriller, one that has a very serious message. While the film is distinguished by Hitchcock’s typically droll sense of humor (eccentric characters abound and the scene where Edmund Gwenn keeps getting interrupted before he can attempt to push Joel McCrea off of a tower is both funny and suspenseful), the film’s message was that America could not afford to stay neutral as war broke out across Europe. As the all-American Johnny Jones says at the end of the film:

“All that noise you hear isn’t static – it’s death, coming to London. Yes, they’re coming here now. You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and the homes. Don’t tune me out, hang on a while – this is a big story, and you’re part of it. It’s too late to do anything here now except stand in the dark and let them come… as if the lights were all out everywhere, except in America. Keep those lights burning, cover them with steel, ring them with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them. Hello, America, hang on to your lights: they’re the only lights left in the world!”

Foreign Correspondent was nominated for best picture of 1940 but it lost to another far different Hitchcock-directed film, Rebecca.

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* Yes, that is how he spells his last name. As he explains, his family dropped the capital name in his surname after an ancestor was executed by Henry II. Since it was George Sanders doing the explaining, it somehow made perfect sense.