Thursday Movie Picks #278: Scientists

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. We're out of October, so no more horror! This time around, the theme is scientists, which sounds like one we might have done before. I came up with three movies, and when I checked to see if I'd used them before, a search of the blog said no I hadn't. However, at least two of the movies I thought I'd written a full-length post on before, and the search didn't find those. It's possible that Google's search (since they own Blogger) is screwing up, but when I did a search with DuckDuckGo, that didn't yield any hits either. One of these days I'm going to have to start getting around to making a database of all the movies I've done full-length posts on. Anyhow, with that in mind, here are the three movies for this week's TMP:

Yellow Jack (1938). You may have heard of Walter Reed, the doctor after whom the big army hospital in the Washington DC area is named. His claim to fame was figuring out that it was mosquitoes that transmitted yellow fever, and eradicated them first from Cuba and then Panama, enabling the construction of the Panama Canal. Lewis Stone plays Reed, with the fictive drama for the movie surrounding a Marine officer played by Robert Montgomery who takes part in the experiments to find the cause of, and cure for, yellow fever.

Green Light (1937). Errol Flynn plays a doctor at a private hospital who takes the fall when his coleague botches a surgery that leaves a patient dead. In order to redeem himself in the eyes of the dead patient's lovely daughter (Anita Louise), Flynn goes off to Montana where an old doctor friend of his (Walter Abel) is researching the cause of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Flynn takes part in the experiments, even though they could kill him since the cure for the disease is not yet known (at least, not at the time the movie was made).

Madame Curie (1943). Greer Garson plays Marie Skłodowska, a Polish physics student who meets Pierre Curie (Walter Pidgeon) and eventually marries him. Together, the two do all sorts of pioneering work in physics, notably isolating the element radium after a lot of research. But Pierre dies tragically while Marie would go on to die of a radiation-induced autoimmune disease.