Butler's Cinema Scene

Paul Muni (right) as Louis Pasteur

“THE STORY OF LOUIS PASTEUR” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 21, at the Kansas City Central Library, 14 W. 10th St., as part of the film series Muni the Magnificent.

The work of scientists generally doesn’t lend itself to dramatization.

In real life, earthshaking breakthroughs are fairly rare. Great cures and life-changing inventions are most often the result of painstaking trial and error over years or decades.

Not that Hollywood has ever let facts get in the way of a good story.

Take, for example, the opening sequence of “The Story of Louis Pasteur.”  In mid-19th century Paris, a physician prepares to go on a house call. He places his instruments in his black bag and, dropping one on the floor, picks it up, wipes it off on his pants leg, and puts it in with the rest.

The camera then pans to a dark alcove. A figure emerges holding a gun. Bang! Dead doctor.

What’s this bit of melodrama got to do with the great microbiologist Louis Pasteur?

Just this. The shooter is the husband of a woman who died at the hands of the doctor. Apparently the widower had read a pamphlet published by Pasteur which excoriates France’s physicians for their failure to sterilize their hands and instruments. And now the distressed husband is taking his revenge.

“The Story of Louis Pasteur” isn’t a full film biography, as it only covers about a decade in the great chemist’s life. For modern audiences it is less about one man than it is about the bad old days of head-in-the-sand medicine, when doctors didn’t think a wound was healing without a lot of pus and took pride in their filthy instruments.

The bulk of physicians, in fact, thought that Pasteur was either a madman or a con artist for his assertion that disease was caused by tiny creatures – germs – that could be seen only under the microscope.

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Chiwetel Ejiofor in “12 Years a Slave”

Steve McQueen’s ante-bellum drama “12 Years a Slave” made off with the big wins Sunday in voting by members of the Kansas City Film Critics Circle.

The movie won top honors for best picture, best actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), supporting actress (Lupita Nyong’o), supporting actor (Michael Fassbender) and for John Ridley’s screenplay adaptation.  McQueen tied for best director with “Gravity’s” Alfonos Cuaron.

Sandra Bullock was named best actress for her performance as an astronaut stranded in space in “Gravity.”

A second tie occurred in the animated featuring voting, with the honors split between “Frozen” and “Despicable Me 2.”

France’s “Blue Is the Warmest Color” was named best foreign language film.

Best original screenplay honors went to Spike Jonze for “Her,” in which an introvert played by Joaquinn Phoenix falls in love with the Siri-like operating system on his computer. “Her” also won the Vince Koehler Award for Best Fantasy, Science Fiction or Horror film.

“The Act of Killing,” in which former right-wing Indonesian death squad members were encouraged to re-enact their crimes for the camera, was named best documentary.

| Robert W. Butler

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“OUT OF THE FURNACE” My rating: C (Opens wide on December 6)

116 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Certain movie genres are best not messed with.

Revenge melodramas and porn, for example. Get too artsy – try too hard to make them relevant and meaningful – and you deny the audience the crude thrills they’ve paid for.

“Out of the Furnace,” a crime drama from writer/director Scott Cooper  (“Crazy Heart,” “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me”), tries to make up for its clichéd yet wildly improbable plotting by pretending to be a character study.

It has a few solid moments, but finally runs aground on the rocks of its own lofty (yet ill defined) ambitions.

Russell Baze (Christian Bale) lives in a Pennsylvania factory town and labors in the local steel mill (the “furnace” of the title). He’s hard-working, decent and in love with the beautiful Lena (Zoe Saldana). He  should be the subject of a Bruce Springsteen song.

His younger brother Rodney (Casey Affleck) is a National Guardsman who has gone through four tours of duty in Iraq (the year is 2008). After all that, normal domestic life seems utterly empty.  Rodney – a gambler usually in arrears with the loan sharks – has taken to participating in illegal bare-knuckle fights. He’s the sort who can take a savage beating for five minutes; then something clicks inside and he becomes a rabid monster.

The first half of “Out of the Furnace” is all about milieu and character. Russell tends to his dying dad and goes deer hunting with his uncle (Sam Shepard). He secretly pays off Rodney’s debts with the local small-town wise guy (Willem Dafoe).

He goes to prison for vehicular homicide when he crashes into another car after a night at the local bar. When he comes out, his girl Lena has taken up with a local cop (Forest Whitaker).

All this is very depressing. There are a couple of fine moments – particularly a tearful, rueful reunion between Russell and Lena during which she announces she’s pregnant by her new man – but the plot seems to have stalled in a swamp of blue-collar angst. (more…)

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“SCARFACE” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 7, at the Kansas City Central Library, 14 W. 10th St., as part of the film series Muni the Magnificent.

Actor Paul Muni (1895-1967) was a human chameleon obsessed with transforming himself for his roles. Throughout the 1930s and into the ‘40s he was considered America’s premier dramatic actor, landing six Oscar nominations and one win.

But along with his genius came some world-class eccentricities.

Muni was painfully shy and became completely unnerved when fans recognized him in public.

He did extensive research to prepare for his roles and once he’d settled on an interpretation no one – not his director, not his fellow actors – could get him to vary from it. He allowed his wife to be the final judge of his work… if she didn’t approve of a scene, it had to be reshot.

Between takes on the movie set he calmed himself by playing a violin. He was thrown into a panic if he saw someone wearing red clothing.

And Muni gave up a lucrative Warner Bros. contract while still in his acting prime.

Born in Austria, Muni came to America as a child. His parents were actors in the Yiddish Theatre and Muni made his stage debut at age 12 playing an 80-year-old man. A master of stage makeup, Muni was so transformed that theater goers didn’t realize he was just a child.

Yiddish was his first language. He didn’t act in English until he was nearly 30 years old.

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