L'épopée du 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.

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.

A Smith called Pete abandon his usual snarky delivery -- although he maintains his nasal tone -- to narrate this short subject covering the discovery of radioactivity and eventually radium.

Like many of MGM's shorts in this period, the performers of this short subject act in dumb show, while the narrator tells you what's going on. This survivial of silent film and benshi-like narration persisted through the middle of the 1950s, with series like Pete Smith's and James A. Fitzpatrick's TRAVELTALKS. Both of these producer-narrators were fond of a long-winded style of delivery. Whether that has any relevance is up to you to figure out.

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.

I prefer my Pete Smith Specialties to be on the light side, so it's unusual to find such a relentlessly grim short subject on the subject of radium--with very little in the way of romance, which makes the title questionable.

The accidental study of radium gets off to a start with one man's discovery of stones exposed to the rays of sunlight and then informing the Curies of his experiment. They were so excited by the prospect of looking further into the matter that they began their famous exploration of radium.

Over the years, other discoveries reveal that the substance has a curative power, dangerous as it is--and the narrator refers to the Jekyll/Hyde nature of radium which has to be carefully handled and controlled when scientists are working on it.

The narration ends with the fact that over the decades radium has been beneficial in saving numerous human lives.

A low-key episode from Pete Smith of moderate interest.