Word: ehrlich
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...Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (Warner Bros.) is 606, the arsenical compound that the dumpy, cigar-puffing Jewish genius found he could shoot into syphilitics and kill the pale spirochetes of syphilis without killing their victim. Warner Brothers have long been afraid that the bullet might ricochet from the Hays Office, the State censorship boards, the U. S. cinemillions conditioned to regard any mention of syphilis as indecent. Consulted in advance, after a fortnight's solemn thought the Hays experts spoke. Their verdict: the word syphilis must be mentioned as seldom as possible in the picture; on no account...
...brusque, bearded, puttering Dr. Ehrlich, Edward G. Robinson gives a conscientious performance, which, without the flashes of dramatic insight that make Paul Muni a great actor, is also without the self-conscious mannerisms that some times turn Muni's art into artiness...
Ruth Gordon, recently brought from Broadway to Hollywood to play shrewish Mary Todd Lincoln, plays an even more difficult role as self-effacing Frau Ehrlich, and plays it better. By shadings of voice, gesture, glance, she becomes the wife who, excluded from her famous husband's death chamber by the presence of his great colleagues and his physician, sits playing the simplest of German love songs: Du, du liegst mir im Herzen. When she can be alone with him at last, he is dead. And her closing of the door upon herself and his body is the picture...
...Ehrlich's colleague, Dr. Robert Koch, the discoverer of the anthrax bacillus, 70-year old German Refugee Albert Basserman gives the picture's outstanding performance. The alert tilt of his head, his probing eyes, even his wary stance are an embodiment of the professional scientific skeptic, who is not unwilling to believe, but has to be shown. Once Ehrlich has shown him, he becomes a gracious, humane old man, remains professionally a skeptic...
...Richard Ehrlich '41, Ridgefield, Conu...