L'alphabet de la santé

I'm ambivalent about these filmlets that Metro and some other studios rolled out in the first decades of sound, before TV made them obsolete. They were often feeble as drama and limited in their technique. The MGM ones avoided synchronous speech and relied on narration which didn't help. However, they are a key element of the nostalgia those of us who lived with them feel for "the selected short subjects" that ran with the big pictures and we now know that some of the heavy hitters of the forties and later worked on them

Here is a very professional item with an elaborate Javanese village and Horace (soon to be Stephen) McNally toiling away with a microscope to discover vitamins, made well into Jacques Tourneur's feature career - the same year he did CAT PEOPLE. The formula - intrepid scientist benefits mankind, despite all opposition, is over familiar but the film is quite watchable and has production values that many features couldn't offer, showing Tourneur and his team's skill.

This episode of John Nesbitt's THE PASSING PARADE starts, as many do, with a conundrum. What is causing night vision in a trucker, nervousness in a typist, and rickets in a boy? Do they have anything in common? And what about beri-beri in Dutch Indonesia in the 19th Century? We are introduced -- namelessly at first -- to Doctor Christiaan Eijkman and his thwarted experiments with chickens that won him a share of the 1929 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

THE PASSING PARADE often interested itself in trifles of great importance; while Nesbitt told us the story -- for the long-running series had originated and continued as a radio feature -- performers acted out the events wordlessly.