A cunning work, Louis Pasteur probably did more than any other sound film to define the biopic. Its plot patterns would be reproduced near-unchanged in subsequent pictures like The Life of Emile Zola, Dr Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, A Dispatch From Reuters, Edison The Man, The Adventures of Mark Twain, et cetera, and still has influence upon flimsy modern contraptions like A Beautiful Mind and The Great Debaters. The single-minded heroic visionary forges ahead against the forces of reaction, bigotry, and pompous officialdom – usually embodied by some conveniently invented characters who have to either convert or eat their hats at the end. Here such a figure is Dr Charbonnet (Fritz Leiber), court physician for Napoleon III and all-round wanker, and his coterie of like-minded establishment dolts who relentlessly stand in the way of Paul Muni’s Pasteur.
It is as entertaining as it is dubious an approach, as Pasteur gains credit for rescuing his nation from debt after the Franco-Prussian War as well as improving health and wellbeing everywhere. At no point is the curing of milk described. If the relentless prods to remind us of the nobility of the hero’s enterprise and the small-mindedness of bureaucrats and hidebound experts get a bit tiresome (though these days, reminders of why we should care are all too often missing from bio-pics), Muni’s performances never do. Tired of playing half-wit hunkies as in Scarface, Black Fury, and Bordertown, Muni pushed to make Pasteur against the resistance of Jack Warner who had no idea a new prestige genre would be born. Muni’s ability to play resources of wit and brilliance mixed with all-too-human moments of befuddlement, prickliness and even a longing for escape to simplicity, invested his Pasteur and Zola with liveliness beyond the hagiographic tendency of the screenplays.
Dieterle’s skilful direction is a great plus. The film begins with a startling communique from an era of pre-modern medicine, where a clumsy, filthy doctor is shot by the grief-stricken husband of a woman who died of infection after he delivered their baby. Dieterle has little chance with the cramped budget and necessarily talky subject matter to make such dramatic impressions, but he constantly finds inventive ways to reduce and communicate complex processes, from the political dissolution of Napoleon III’s empire to the method of Pasteur’s working to discover a cure for rabies. Dieterle builds to a haunting moment where Pasteur, rattled by lack of sleep, overwork, and his daughter’s giving birth, slowly subsides into the black insensibility of a stroke.
The quality often lacking from modern bio-pics, for all their warts and all approach, is that as they throw in all the moments of drug addiction, infidelity and mental illness we love so much, they usually leave out the context of achievement that Pasteur works so hard to present. Pasteur isn’t as good a film as Zola, for that film’s high drama came tied in a ribbon. But you could do a lot worse…like A Beautiful Mind…
The horror movie fan in me notes that here Pasteur’s wife is played by Josephine Hutchinson, who would later play Basil Rathbone’s wife in The Son of Frankenstein, just as Zola’s wife was played by Gloria Holden, of Dracula’s Daughter fame.
