The FT Magazine on scientists in film
"Science invented cinema but, like Frankenstein's monster, cinema turned against science."
- The FT Magazine book reviews, Oct. 1-2 2005, p.33 (not available online)
In this lively book review of Christopher Frayling's hot new book Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema, we hear that, as most of us already suspected, Hollywood has it in for scientists. The reviewer continues: "The history of film is crammed with malevolent, mad or plain misguided scientists with wild ambitions and even wilder hair, bent over bubbling test tubes that threaten to wreak havoc. The flipside of this – the kindly boffins in Bond films or rose-tinted biopics of Madam Curie – is equally unrealistic. In cinema, it seems, science is either idealised or vilified."