Madame Curie (1943)

Madame Curie
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy
Written by Paul Osborn and Hans Rameau from the book Madame Curie by Éve Curie
1943/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Warner Archives DVD

[box] Pierre Curie: No true scientist can have anything to do with women.[/box]

It is refreshing to see a movie about people who are passionate about their work – even more so to see one about a woman who is passionate about hers.

Marie Slodowska (Greer Garson) is a Polish physics student in Paris.  She desperately needs laboratory space so she can do the work necessary to complete her degree.  One of her professors basically tricks noted physicist Pierre Curie (Walter Pidgeon) into taking her on by not revealing her gender.  Pierre is painfully shy and awkward and totally wrapped up in his own work.  But Marie also sees the poetry in physics and Pierre finds she is the ideal lab partner.  When Marie graduates and prepares to return to Poland, he also learns that he cannot live without her.  The couple basically marry to continue their work together but we see love blossoming after the wedding.

The remainder of the story is devoted to the couple’s arduous work to isolate a new element they have hypothesized. This takes years of work in a hot stuffy shack and painstaking rigor.  In the end, they are lionized for the discovery of radium.  They are given  the Nobel Prize, Marie becoming the first woman to be so honored.   The story skips over Marie’s solo work after 1906 when Pierre died.  With Robert Walker as Pierre’s student and Dame May Whitty and Henry Travers as his parents.

One gets the sense that Marie Curie was perhaps not so utterly charming as Greer Garson makes her, but the performance is nonetheless a delight to watch.  And, for the first time, I actually liked Walter Pidgeon very much in this!  All the qualities that make him miss the mark as a romantic lead for me suit the character of Pierre perfectly.  As can be expected from a “big” MGM picture, the production values are outstanding.

Madame Curie was nominated for seven Academy Awards:  Best Picture; Best Actor; Best Actress; Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (Joseph Ruttenberg); Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Black-and-White; Best Sound, Recording; and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture.

Trailer