Romance of Radium

Romance of Radium (1937)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Oscar-nominated Pete Smith short takes a look at radium and how it become so important. Dr. Henri Antoine Becquerel (Andre Cheron) discovers that while radium has the power to kill many it also, if used right, has the power to heal. This is a shockenly sober Smith short, which normally isn't the case with his films. Often times he tells sly jokes or wisecracks but that's not the case here as he takes the subject matter very straight. There were other short series out there doing real-life dramas and I can't help but think one of those would have handled the story better. That's not to say this is a bad film because it isn't but it's not good either. Tourneur's direction really doesn't get to add much since a lot of the action is cut up to tell different parts of the story. The best sequence, where the director does get to work some magic, is when an African tribesman is buried after being injured by a tiger. I won't spoil what happens but it's a very nice sequence.

An MGM Pete Smith Specialty.

This unusually sober Pete Smith Short, directed by Jacques Tourneur, gives the history behind the discovery of the marvelous substance, radium, and discusses a few of its potential applications, as understood in the 1930's.

Often overlooked or neglected today, the one and two-reel short subjects were useful to the Studios as important training grounds for new or burgeoning talents, both in front & behind the camera. The dynamics for creating a successful short subject was completely different from that of a feature length film, something akin to writing a topnotch short story rather than a novel. Economical to produce in terms of both budget & schedule and capable of portraying a wide range of material, short subjects were the perfect complement to the Studios' feature films.

It's odd to hear Pete Smith delivering a more straight narrative, but he does it quite authoritatively as we see a few historical scenarios that illustrate just how the accidental discovery of an element that glowed in the dark led Marie Curie to discover this highly toxic element that was amongst the rarest on earth. It needed a mammoth degree of refining from it's source ore to yield the tiniest amount of it's salt but this process revealed, somewhat miraculously, that despite it's lethal qualities it also had remarkable curative powers, too! It's quite a revelatory short feature this that demonstrates just how much luck and sheer determination, especially at times in history when technology didn't exist, was involved and the significant levels of danger faced by those who experimented with this newfound chemical. Indeed, throughout it's development there were many fatalities amongst the scientific community as the potential of radium was explored. Many of these science features can be terribly dry and uninteresting, but this one stays quite watchable for ten minutes.

This Pete Smith Specialty, nominated for an Academy Award, was not the standard Pete Smith effort. Serious in tone and subject matter, this tells the story of the discovery of the diagnostic and curative powers of radium. The more subdued, less humorous, narration is a departure for Smith and is not entirely successful, but it's still a fascinating work nonetheless. Worth seeking out. Turner Classic Movies runs this between movies periodically. The best chance to catch this is probably in March, as part of the "31 Days of Oscar" festival. Recommended.

Pete Smith's Academy Award-nominated "Romance of Radium" is worth seeing as a science lesson. It focuses on the chemical element radium, its discovery, and its uses. Of course, nowadays we know how dangerous that stuff can be, so seeing the characters handling it so casually looks insane. In fact, Marie Curie had died from radiation exposure a few years before the movie got released. Not to mention that the movie contains some politically incorrect material.

Aside from those missteps, the movie does contain some good information about the stuff. It's one of the many shorts that got shown to movie audiences back in the '30s right before the feature came on.