Hollywood (1938)

WE. 3 HUNTER In his role of the reckless Sergeant O'Hara, Robert Montgomery gaies with a fatalistic humor at the imprisoned mosquitoes which may mean death to him and safety to millions Inspired by Yellow Jack, Robert Montgomery undertook independent research into the cause and cure of the dread disease "Hollywooditis" By TERRY KELLY ■ Yellow hell was loose in Cuba. It was the turn of the century, and thousands were dying of a plague — a plague of inexplicable cause, and therefore all the more horrifying. People were normal one minute, then delirious with wild fever the next. They called it Yellow Fever, and it wiped out whole families at a swoop, or again picked out one victim among twenty 28 huddled together. Superstitions about the plague ran wild — people fled in terror when each new case developed. More American soldiers were dying from it than from the booming cannonades of the Spanish-American war. . , . The great turning point of this Yellow Fever siege was being re-enacted on Stage Fifteen of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios when I walked on the set. It was a critical, dramatic moment. The scene was an accurate, detailed replica of Camp Lazear, at Quemados, Cuba. It was so real that you forgot this was Hollywood, and wished silently that you had a gas mask or something better than that to protect yourself from this dread disease. ■ It is a brilliantly sunny day — and hot. The sun and heat is supplied by the biggest sunlamp in Hollywood — an apparatus scorching the set with 1,000,000 candlepower. Isolated in a hot tent is a young man of the American army who is about to verify, he hopes, the conclusion of the great Dr. Reed that Yellow Fever is contagious only through the bite of one lone type of mosquito. The soldier keeping a rendezvous with death is Sergeant O'Hara (Bob Montgomery). His doctor-superior is played by Lewis Stone. And the woman who urged Sergeant O'Hara to thus sacrifice himself is a young nurse, played by Virginia Bruce. All around the camp people pause, terrified by the inexplicable spread of this deadly disease. They cover their faces with cloth, hoping to avoid contagion. The desperate doctors of the Yellow Fever Commission, are preparing to gamble with death for the life of the man, in order to save lives of millions. ■ O'Hara, alone in his tent, holds a jar full of mosquitoes in his hands. His tent is sterile, isolated, comfortable, airy, but death is locked in with him if the doctors are right in believing that mosquitoes carry the disease that is wiping out the army. Will they kill him, thus proving that one single type of insect is to blame for this horrible massacre? O'Hara slowly unfastens the lid of the jar. For a moment he shudders involuntarily. Then he hesitates no longer. Firm to his purpose, he allows the mosquitoes to crawl out upon his arm. One of the insects poises as if to bite. O'Hara lifts a hand to slap it into eternity, then stifles the motion in mid-air. He must be bitten, not once, but many times. Calmly he holds still, and his arm is punctured by tiny beaks. Everyone is grimly silent as the cameras record this fateful moment. You feel as if you, yourself, are undergoing this awful experiment. And then, suddenly, it is HOLLYWOOD