Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940) on Netflix
Approved19401h 43mBiographyDrama
Dismissed from a German hospital for ignoring its rules, Paul Ehrlich searches for dyes that stain one kind of microbe and nothing else. Emil von Behring befriends him.
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- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.4/102,028 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Paul Ehrlich wants dyes that behave with absolute precision, marking one kind of cell or microorganism and leaving everything else alone. The German hospital where he works dismisses him for disregarding its rules, tangled in red tape. Emil von Behring, a researcher he meets while experimenting with staining techniques, calls the method specific staining and counts it a great achievement in science. When Robert Koch presents evidence that tuberculosis comes from a bacterium, Ehrlich gets a sample of the isolated microbe and, through long research in his own laboratory, with some luck and his wife Hedwig's empathy, works out a viable way to stain it. Koch and medical circles treat that as another valuable contribution to diagnostics.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Warner Bros. executives considered never saying the word "syphilis" at all, but head of production Hal B. Wallis argued to the Production Code office that leaving out Ehrlich's anti-syphilis drug Salvarsan would be unfair to the record. The film won approval only on condition that no scenes showing treatment of syphilis patients were shown, and that its advertising could not mention syphilis.
SPOILER
A memorandum circulated by the studio bosses warned it would be "a mistake to make a political propaganda picture out of a biography which could stand on its own feet." The words "Jew" and "Jewish" went entirely unmentioned in Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, anti-Semitism was barely hinted at, and the original deathbed scene was changed so Ehrlich no longer referred to the Pentateuch.- Edward G. Robinson, himself Jewish, took the title role to break out of the police and gangster parts he feared would stereotype him forever. He met Paul Ehrlich's daughter, who had fled to the United States, and corresponded with Ehrlich's widow Hedwig, a refugee in Switzerland.
- The real Paul Ehrlich, the German doctor the film is about, won a Nobel Prize in 1908 for his work on immunity. By the time the film was made, the Nazi regime in Germany had expunged all memory of him from public buildings and street signs and censored books that referred to him.
- The screenplay by Norman Burnstine, Heinz Herald and John Huston was nominated for the first ever Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, a new category in which it lost at the 13th Academy Awards to The Great McGinty.
