Penicillin : both its mold and its morals seem to hang out in basements and sewers

Rollo Martins the Canadian naif to Harry Lime's evil...

When I started looking into wartime penicillin, back in late 2004, I quickly felt like that other Canadian , Rollo Martins, learning far more about the immoral underbelly of  the official - and sunny - penicillin story than either of us wanted to know.

HARRY LIME : from war hero to infamous cinematic villain

Just one of HARRY LIME's "dots"

(See note below added, Dec 4 2012)

It is easy to imagine our Harry (Lime) in July 1943, just back from Hamburg as an Allied bomber pilot dropping fire bombs on Axis children, mere "dots", thousands of feet below him : a war hero, in other words.

Just as easy as imagining our Harry in 1949 Vienna, still a member of an Allied nation and still killing Axis children, only this time with watered-down penicillin.

But something has clearly changed : because now he is regarded as a a villain, in fact one of cinema's all time worst villains.