NFR Project: ‘The Life of Emile Zola’
Dir: William Dieterle
Scr: Heinz Herald, Gea Herczeg, Norman Reilly Raine
Pho: Tony Gaudio
Ed: Warren Low
Premiere: Aug. 11, 1937
116 min.
Paul Muni (1895-1967) was one-of-a kind film actor. His great success was his versatility, an inversion of the usual path to Hollywood stardom, which usually involves molding parts to fit a premade, unvarying persona.
Immigrant child Frederich Weisenfreund became Paul Muni suddenly, at the movie studio’s insistence, in 1929. Before then, he had garnered a host of positive reviews for his stage work in Chicago and New York. He was particularly known for his ability to create transforming makeup for his roles, enabling him to play a broader variety of parts.
Muni first came to fame as the star of Warner Brothers’ crime pictures Scarface and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. He immediately pulled away from this type of role and proposed playing scientist Louis Pasteur. He did so, and promptly won the Oscar for Best Actor. Now he sought to continue his streak of portraying famous men.
Emile Zola (1840-1902) was a French writer who thrived on controversy. His third novel, Therese Raquin, was a scandalous best-seller. Zola kept on in this vein, striking again with Nana, a novel about a prostitute. Zola made a career of exploring all the aspects of society criticizing stupidity and injustice, and exposing corruption and truth – to the enthusiasm of his readership and the dismay of the powers that be.
Zola eventually became a conventional and lauded figure. However, all that changed when he became involved with the Dreyfus affair.
In 1894, the French army discovered that someone on the general staff was passing secret military information to the Germans. Captain Dreyfus, a Jew, was accused without evidence of being the culprit. Despite his avowals that he was innocent, he was court-martialed and sent to Devil’s Island. Various attempts to exonerate him, bolstered by evidence, were harshly rebuffed by the army brass, who didn’t want to look like idiots.
Years passed, then Zola was finally convinced to take up the cause. In his famous public letter to the nation, “J’Accuse<” on the front page of the daily newspaper L’Aurore. In it, he accused the army and the government of obstruction of justice and antisemitism. Zola himself was brought to trial for making this statement, and was convicted. He briefly went into exile in England, but returned to France after charges were dropped against him.
The film is truly more about the Dreyfus case, which takes up two-thirds of the film’s two-hour running time. Muni quickly establishes the character of Zola and ages up to an appropriate level of maturity so that the Dreyfus scandal can be outlined in thoroughgoing detail.
Warner Brothers spared no expense to make this film look convincing, and the production design is intensely detailed and accurate, utilizing massive sets and crowds of performers to make scenes, especially the courtroom scenes, impressive. (There’s a wonderful shot of a sea of umbrellas, standing outside in a downpour, waiting for the court’s verdict.)
The film is about par for the course as far as accuracy goes, which is to say not very. Zola and the painter Cezanne were long-time friends, but in real life they had a bitter parting after he wrote the novel The Masterpiece. The Dreyfus chronology is only somewhat accurate – Dreyfus was not fully exonerated until 1906, four years after Zola’s death.
The twin engines of the film are Muni’s performance and a super-articulate script that makes a stirring case for the fight of truth against those in power. It is remarkably frank about the government and army's self-interest. Interestingly, the most significant part of the Dreyfus case, its underlying and profound antisemitism, is completely overlooked in this film – it is said that the producers didn’t want to alienate European audiences with pro-Jewish material. (Once the Nazis invaded Poland, the anti-Nazi films started coming thick and fast out of Hollywood.)
Muni is amazing not just because of his ability to transform himself physically (in the same year, he donned politically incorrect “yellowface” to play the lead role of Wang Lung in the film version of The Good Earth). He is able to put himself in the moment on screen. He is an active listener, and his reactions are spontaneous within the context of his character. You can see that he’s really living inside someone else’s head. In other words, everyone else is acting; he is being.
The ensemble cast is great and includes Donald Crisp, Louis Calhern, and Gale Sondergaard in her most sympathetic role, that of Mrs. Dreyfus. Joseph Schildkraut plays Dreyfus, and revied the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. The film won Best Picture.
It’s unique for its time in that it makes a hero of a liberal iconoclast, someone who made a career out of fighting the establishment. At its heart it’s an underdog story too. Muni would continue to impersonate other historical figures, but he would never succeed as completely as he would in The Life of Emile Zola.
The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Make Way for Tomorrow.
