General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Story of Louis Pasteur

The Story of Louis Pasteur is a 1936 American black-and-white biographical film directed by William Dieterle, with Paul Muni as the French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur (1822–1895). Produced by Warner Bros. (through First National Productions), it dramatizes Pasteur's advocacy of germ theory, his anthrax vaccine trial, and his rabies treatment, and it won three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Muni.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writers	William Dieterle; story and screenplay by Sheridan Gibney and Pierre Collings¹
Lead cast	Paul Muni (Louis Pasteur), Josephine Hutchinson (Marie Pasteur), Anita Louise (Annette Pasteur), Donald Woods (Dr. Jean Martel), Fritz Leiber (Dr. Charbonnet)¹
Release	22 February 1936 (AFI); Rotten Tomatoes lists a theatrical date of 23 November 1935; runtime about 85–87 minutes¹^•³
Academy Awards	Best Actor (Muni), Best Writing Original Story and Best Writing Screenplay (Gibney and Collings); nominated for Best Picture²
Other honors	National Board of Review Top Ten Films (1936); Volpi Cup for Best Actor, Venice 1936 (Muni)²
Critical scores	90% Tomatometer (10 reviews) and 76% Popcornmeter on Rotten Tomatoes; Metascore 82 on Metacritic³^•⁴
Production cost	Under $400,000, with sets recycled from Warner musicals and horror films¹

Spoilers

Plot and historical scope

The film opens in 1860, when chemist Louis Pasteur is scorned by most doctors for his theory that germs cause disease. After a doctor is killed by the husband of a patient who died of puerperal fever, because the husband had read Pasteur's pamphlet advocating sterilization of instruments, Pasteur is ordered to stop publishing. Ten years later an anthrax epidemic decimates French livestock, and a controlled test shows that all inoculated sheep survive while uninoculated sheep die. After watching a villager die of rabies, Pasteur works on a treatment, realizing that the virus loses virulence over time and that resistance can be built by injecting increasing amounts; he experiments on a small boy bitten by a rabid dog.¹

The screenplay concentrates on three episodes rather than Pasteur's whole career: his sterilization crusade, the anthrax inoculation, and the rabies cure. Much of his earlier scientific work is left out, and there is little reference to pasteurization.³ The cast includes Henry O'Neill as Dr. Emile Roux, Halliwell Hobbes as Dr. Joseph Lister, Akim Tamiroff as Dr. Zaronoff, Walter Kingsford as Napoleon III, and Dickie Moore as Joseph Meister; the antagonist Dr. Charbonnet is a fictionalized opponent of Pasteur.¹^•³

Production

The film went through several titles before release, including Enemy of Man, The Fighter, and Death Fighter. According to modern sources cited by the AFI catalog, co-writer Pierre Collings was too ill to write much of the screenplay, which Sheridan Gibney worked on almost alone; producer Hal B. Wallis disliked the material and wanted Gibney replaced by Laird Doyle, but Muni insisted on keeping him. As a measure against Muni, the film was budgeted at under $400,000 and shot partly on converted musical-film sets: a Busby Berkeley set became the palace of Napoleon III, and the laboratory set came from The Mystery of the Wax Museum.¹

The key creative team, associate producer Henry Blanke, director William Dieterle, cinematographer Tony Gaudio, and editor Ralph Dawson, established the narrative formula for Warner's prestige biopics of the late 1930s, in which a farsighted central figure battles narrow-minded defenders of the status quo; in this film the opposition is personified by the French Academy of Sciences and its president.⁵ Dieterle, Muni, and Blanke followed it with The Life of Emile Zola (1937), which won the Best Picture Oscar.³

Awards and reception

At the 9th Academy Awards, honoring films of 1936, Paul Muni won Best Actor, and Sheridan Gibney and Pierre Collings won both Best Writing, Original Story and Best Writing, Screenplay; the film was one of ten nominees for Outstanding Production, which went to The Great Ziegfeld.²^•⁶ The National Board of Review named it a Top Ten Film of 1936, and Muni won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at Venice; the film was also a top moneymaker of its year.²^•¹

Contemporary and later critics praised Muni's performance and the film's craftsmanship. Frank S. Nugent of The New York Times called it an excellent biography, dignified in subject and brilliantly played; Variety singled out expert casting and Muni's top form, while noting some dull stretches of scientific discourse.³ TV Guide Magazine described it as well told, with an intelligent script and careful attention to scientific accuracy.⁴ A 1936 Nature review of the London gala screening admired Muni's portrayal of Pasteur's ardour, temper, and fits of despondency, but regretted that the film contained many historical errors.⁷

Historical accuracy

The film takes substantial liberties. Nature noted that Napoleon III is shown forbidding Pasteur to continue his anthrax research and to recant his published views, whereas Pasteur's anthrax work did not begin until after the Emperor's death; in reality Napoleon III took a warm interest in Pasteur's investigations.⁷ Audience and scholarly commentary likewise describe the film as a highly fictionalized, hagiographic account that steers away from Pasteur's controversies with rivals.³

A scholarly chapter by Bart K. Holland, a biostatistician at Rutgers University, examines internal Warner Bros. records showing conscious alterations made to improve the film's commercial potential, and argues that the film works simultaneously as a saint's life and as an anti-Nazi parable, depicting an idealized individual struggle against an ignorant mob, consistent with the studio's pride in spreading an anti-fascist message in the 1930s.⁸ The film's heroic image also reflects an older historiography: later analysis of Pasteur's laboratory notebooks showed differences between his public reports and his private science, with the historian Gerald Geison's book The Private Science of Louis Pasteur bringing greater realism to the story.⁹^•¹⁰

Legacy

The film is often credited as an origin point of the docudrama format, and it set the template for the Hollywood scientist biopic, including tropes such as the montage of failed experiments and the rousing speech on the value of science.¹¹ It remains available on home video and streaming, and it is still used in science education as an introduction to germ theory, vaccination, and the resistance new ideas met in nineteenth-century medicine.¹²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026