Madame Curie, one of the ten nominees for Best Picture of 1943, is of a science lesson than a biographical movie at times. The story of how Marie and Pierre Curie met and then devoted themselves to the discovery of radium, Madame Curie is really not really just about the title character; it's about both of the influential scientists. The film is ostensibly a love story intermingled with recreations of the experiments that drove the two scientists to spend many years of their lives (and endangering their health) for the sake of scientific discovery. While I might have wished for less time in their laboratory and more time with them at home, the film does a nice job of showing the grueling work they undertook in order to better the lives of other people.
The film begins with Marie Sklodowska (Greer Garson) as a student at the Sorbonne in Paris. She's come from a poor family in Poland, so she doesn't always have the money for such necessities as regular meals. She's working on a master's degree in physics and mathematics, and she's distinguished herself in her classes. However, without any money, she will have to return to Poland to live with her father and perhaps abandon scientific research. One of the more sympathetic professors at the school, Professor Perot (Albert Bassermann) recommends that she take on a project that will help to keep her at the university so that she can continue her studies. The only catch is that she must share laboratory space with another scientist, Pierre Curie (Walter Pidgeon), and he's very particular about how his lab operates. Just ask his assistant David (Robert Walker), who tries to spell out the rules to Marie on her first day. And Pierre's particularly unhappy about sharing space with a woman, "the natural enemy of science."
They are, however, exceedingly polite to each other upon meeting. They don't interfere with each other's work, and she manages to stay quieter than David does. One evening when Marie and Pierre are departing the building in a rainstorm, he walks her home under his umbrella and they discuss matters related to physics while on their way. I had, of course, no idea what they were discussing, give that my last physics class was in high school about thirty years ago now, but they seem so immediately drawn to each other's minds that you know that's just the scientific way of showing love. Hot stuff, those deep conversations about physics problems.
Imagine Pierre's shock when he discovers that she will be returning to Warsaw after finishing her doctorate, apparently abandoning a life of science in the process. He goes to her apartment and finds her packing to leave, so he invites her to the country home of his parents for the weekend before she leaves Paris (and him). His parents, played by reliable character actors Henry Travers and May Whitty (later Dame May Whitty), can see that he's in love, but Pierre is a scientist, not a romantic. It takes a long night of pacing the floor in his room for him to develop the nerve to ask her to marry him. Of course, he doesn't put it in such terms. To him, it will be "a wonderful collaboration," just like salt. No, I'm not kidding. He compares their relationship to the one between the different elements in salt. When you have such a romantic devil like that on your hands, you'd best marry him even if he's never even kissed you.
After a honeymoon that includes a great deal of discussion of her planned experiments with radiation, they return to the lab to begin work. It's another scientist who earlier got them interested in the work that will consume much of their lives. He had found that a material called pitchblende seems to give off x-rays on its own. Both Pierre and Marie found this intriguing at first, but they went back to the work they had already started. It's only after their marriage, when starts working on the puzzle the other scientist prompted, that she starts to find some anomalies in the measurements of radiation, and that gets Pierre to thinking so much about the problem that he doesn't even pay much attention when his father keeps talking about grandchildren. They'd rather produce a scientific discovery than an heir, it seems. When you watch them rush back to the lab, you can only imagine that this must be a form of foreplay for the two of them.
What follows is a lot of scientific mumbo jumbo, something about thorium and measurements and residue and such. I don't know that we are really meant to follow all of this scientific discussion in detail, but I suppose the film's creators didn't want to gloss over the work of the Curies too quickly. They did make remarkable contributions to science--Pierre says it's really "the secret of life itself"--and the film is careful to give a thorough overview of the amount of work it took for them to have any breakthroughs. Garson and Pidgeon sweat lot, for example, when their boiling down the pitchblende. I don't know that we need as much information as we are given by the narrator, but I suppose viewers with a more scientific bent will find it all intriguing.
The film does a good job of demonstrating just how radical the work of the Curies was to the scientific community. The professors at the Sorbonne, for example, refuse to grant the Curies more money and laboratory space to conduct their research. One of the critics dismisses Marie as "young, inexperienced, and a woman." They wind up with a leaky shed--and it seems to rain all the time when they are working--with no budget or equipment. They remain steadfast in their efforts, though. At times, I felt like the movie was recreating all four years of efforts to isolate radium. The most innovative aspect of this long sequence is the use of time-lapse photography to depict the process of crystallization the Curies used to locate radium. Thankfully, we are not subjected to all 5,677 crystallizations they undertook. The voice-over narration spares us from having to watch some of the more mundane details.
The movie also skims over a few relevant details along the way, at least relevant to those wanting more than just a movie about science. Marie develops burns on her hands, but after being warned of a possible threat of cancer by her doctor, she returns to the experiments. So dedicated is she to the possibility that their work could eventually be used to destroy cancerous tissue that she risks her own health. The couple also have two children, so I suppose there must have been a couple of times when they didn't spend all of their nights boiling pitchblende or spreading out little dishes of isolated material to crystallize. We also, sadly, don't get much else in the way of the love between the two of them. It's only near the end of the film that Pierre seems to start thinking about his wife as a woman instead of a colleague.
Garson is very good here. She always was such a warm, caring presence in films that you can't really hide that with all of the scientific talk that she's asked to deliver. Her lovely nature and generous spirit shine through whatever guise she has to adopt. And Pidgeon, who had a long career in films, is a solid counterpart to Garson's warmth. He's frequently called upon to reflect Pierre's absent-mindedness, and he brings a gentle sense of humor to those moments in the film. They are a nicely matched couple, and the film's greatest strength is their chemistry. They subtly manage, even if Madame Curie doesn't, to reveal the love that Marie and Pierre Curie had for each other as they worked side-by-side all those years.
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