Popular reviews

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  Review by 📀 Cammmalot 📀 ★★★ 2

  Cinematic Time Capsule
  1940 Marathon - Film #19

  ”I’m trying to find magic bullets with which to fight human diseases”

  Edward G. Robinson steps away from his over the top gangster roles to lose himself in this biopic of Jewish German biomedical scientist Dr. Ehrlich. He does a great job and it’s probably the most grounded and real performance I’ve seen from him. Ruth Gordon plays his devoted wife in her second co-starring role and it’s great to see the twinkle in her eye was fully intact from the very beginning.

  The Oscar Nominated screenplay was co-written by John Huston, but to the modern eye it’s a pretty by the numbers biopic that doesn’t offer a whole lot of drama…

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  Review by russman ★★★

  Pfft, David Ehrlich hasn't even logged this film

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  Review by Ripplin ★★★★ 3

  If you want to show someone that E.G. Robinson was not just that guy that played gangsters and said 'see' a lot, this biographical movie is a good place to start. (f.y.i., Paul Muni was also doing some excellent biographical pics around this time) He plays a gentle, compassionate man, very unlike the general perception of roles he usually played. To be fair, he could pretty much do it all.

  The "magic bullet" in question is the drug 606 (named for the 606th test compound, which turned out to be a successful one after 605 failures), which Dr. Paul Erhlich and his team developed to cure syphilis, a disease which still has a certain stigma attached to it now, but…

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  Review by PUNQ ★★★

  Paul Muni wasn't available, I take it? For this was right up his alley. He's already done an identical portrayal of Louis Pasteur in The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936). Might be a case of 'been there, done that', or not wanting his name attached to syphilis, giving others a chance at those prestigious biopics of distinguished people. Thus letting Edward G. Robinson a chance to do a different character to his endless string of gangsters. Still heavy on the make-up and beard. Could still have been Muni under there, but in a way Robinson is less hammy in his acting of a real person then Muni would have been. As far as the movies goes. It's respectable work. A tribute more then a compelling story, but does what it sets out to do, giving us a pleasant education on a medical pioneer.

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  Review by Lowbacca ★★★★½

  Edward G Robinson is so often associated with certain kinds of roles that it's always a pleasure to watch him in a role that takes him outside some kind of tough, and putting him into this sort of role as a doctor and researcher is quite beyond that limited scope. So Robinson's performance alone is a selling point.

  The story is also captivating, at least in part because I, shamefully, do not know nearly enough about Dr. Ehrlich going into this, so it was a bit of a surprise to see where this was going to go. I also really did appreciate how this this deals with some really serious questions with science and how one maintains a human concern…

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  Review by Davitt ★★★

  More a laundry list of accomplishments than a compelling narative of a man, but Robinson's quiet command of Paul Ehrlich plus Max Steiner's score make this worth a watch. Also, I didn't even know who Ehrlich was before watching this, and now I do! 🌈 🌟 The more you know

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  Review by Eric ★★★★

  During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hollywood released a number of historical biographies championing world leaders, innovative scientists, and otherwise influential thinkers. A number of the most significant pictures – the widely-acclaimed The Life of Emile Zola, for example – were directed by William Dieterle, a valuable asset at Warner Brothers. German-born, part of Dieterle’s intentions with Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet were to remind Americans that, despite the world conflict, it was important to remember that many Germans were noble and hard-working. The titular doctor is scientist Paul Ehrlich, famous for discovering the treatment for syphilis in the early 20th century. While the film shares much in common with Dieterle’s The Story of Louis Pasteur, it is in every…

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  Review by Henrique Quadros 2

  Another one of those William Dieterle directed biopics that came out around this time. The 1930s saw a lot of these scientist biopics and honestly I feel like the genre should make a comeback (I guess Nolan's Oppenheimer counts?), since so much of the history of science is taken for granted that people often repeat the same ignorances portrayed in this very film!

  Rant aside, here is another film whose wikipedia page is more entertaining than the film itself. So as I said, this period had many scientist biopics and the Nazis made a lot of them themselves, including one about Dr. Robert Koch which came out in 1939. Of course in that film Dr Koch is portrayed as a…

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  Review by Michael_Elliott ★★★½

  John Huston co-wrote the screenplay and won an Oscar for it for this bio-pic from Warner. Dr. Paul Ehrlich, played brilliantly by Edward G. Robinson, draws heat from his peers when he decides to try and find a cure for the morally incorrect syphilis. It's rather shocking to find out that Robinson never received an Oscar nomination and it's even more shocking after watching his brilliant work here, which is perhaps the greatest I've seen from him.

  He has to age several decades here but Robinson nails each stage of the doctor's life from his early days working in a hospital to his final days dealing with a trial over his syphilis serum. It's amazing to see how much Robinson…

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  Review by David Burgess ★★★★

  MAY MOVIE MAGIC

  For the third pick for our Edward G Robinson tribute we chose Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet. It was interesting to see the man play something other that a criminal gangster. And he did so with great: success I might add. EGR plays the role of Dr. Ehrlich, the imminent medical doctor and chemist who not only pioneered many of the now common place techniques for fighting infectious disease but as the movie shows came up with the cure for Syphilis. EGR plays the humble, soft spoken doctor with perfect aplomb and gone is any hint of the dangerous gangster persona that EGR is famous for. Honestly EGR'S performance is in my opinion Oscar worthy. This is definitely one movie people need to catch.

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  Review by Jackson ★★½

  This film takes from the "Life of Emile Zola" school of poster design

  1. It's just the lead actor
  2. They're clean shaven, even though the character is bearded throughout the movie
  3. Absolutely nothing indicating what the movie is actually about, perhaps even misleading.

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  Review by rayb7067 ★★★★

  Pretty good film about the man who invented the cure for syphilis. Edward G. Robinson has one of his best roles here (it's a sin that this man was never nominated for an Oscar), with a strong cast backing him up - Ruth Gordon, Otto Kruger, Donald Crisp, Maria Ouspenskaya, Montagu Love, Sig Ruman, Donald Meek, Henry Daniell, Albert Basserman, Harry Davenport and Louis Calhern. Directed by William Dieterle. Nominated for a Best Writing, Original Screenplay Oscar.