Hello!

Gary Teetel forwarded this announcement of a new restoration by the Library of Congress and the Film Foundation, to be premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on January 24. It’s the original theatrical release version of John Ford’s film of Arrowsmith, with Ronald Colman and Helen Hayes, from the book by Sinclair Lewis.

Arrowsmith is one of many pre-Code movies that were censored for reissue, and the original release version not retained. The most famous is King Kong, but its gruesome ‘extra bits’ were eventually reinstated from surviving foreign prints. Jump-cuts persist in the latest restorations of Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight, where some frisky dialogue was excised … the word virgin was eliminated.

It’s a much-anticipated event, but MoMA’s announcement is confusing. Arrowsmith’s new copy is said to be “restored from a nitrate print owned by the film’s star Ronald Colman, that’s 10 minutes longer than subsequent versions.” That sounds great until we read the new duration, 101 minutes. The existing Warner Archive Collection DVD of Arrowsmith from 2014 is 99 minutes. The DVD looks like one of WB’s worthy reconstruction jobs, incorporating footage here and there from a slightly inferior source. Is Ronald Colman’s copy only a little more complete than what Warners was able to reconstruct for DVD?

The AFI lists the original running time at 108 minutes. The original Variety review does as well. There are plenty of scenes in the film that could have been longer. Did producer Samuel Goldwyn perhaps use the censor cut to trim down rest of the movie?

The most-missed material in Arrowsmith is rumored to involve actress Myrna Loy. While fighting an outbreak of disease in the tropics, Ronald Colman’s doctor Martin Arrowsmith meets Loy’s character Joyce during a test of an anti-disease serum. Joyce is barely in the WAC’s 99-minute version, raising the suspicion that cuts were made to her scenes. The synopsis in the AFI Catalog says that “Joyce and Martin go to bed together,” but the WAC cut only shows him thinking about her from the next room.

We wouldn’t expect Ford to film anything resembling a real bedroom scene, so perhaps the original version simply shows Martin starting to walk in her direction. The ‘morning after’ has them sharing a knowing look. Was there another Martin & Joyce dialogue scene or two?  Perhaps some of the excised content showed them talking about their indiscretion, an equal Code no-no.

We’ll be curious to see these questions straightened out … a better copy of Arrowsmith will be reward enough.