1937: The Life of Emile Zola

The Best Picture Oscar for 1937 went to the  Warner Brothers biopic "The Life of Emile Zola."  It also won for Best Supporting Actor (Joseph Schildkraut) and Best Screenplay (Heinz Herald, Geza Herczeg, and Norman Reilly Raine).  It was also nominated for Best Director (William Dieterle), Best Actor (Paul Muni), Best Art Direction (Anton Grot), Best Score (Max Steiner), Best Sound Recording (Nathan Levinson), Best Original Story (Heinz Herald and Geza Herczeg), and Best Assistant Director (Russ Saunders).

I found this film to be dreadfully dull.  It begins in 1862 with Emile Zola (Paul Muni) and Paul Cezanne (Vladimir Sokoloff) sharing a run-down studio apartment in Paris.  Zola writes a scandalous (but best-selling) book about the underbelly of Paris called "Nana."  He continues to write and becomes a huge, wealthy success, finally marrying his fiance Alexandrine (Gloria Holden).  Cezanne - still a struggling painter - decides to leave Paris for the south of France, but not before telling Zola that his success has made him complacent, no longer taking on social and political issues.

Paul Muni and Gale Sondergaard

Meanwhile, it comes to light that there is a traitor among the officers of the French Army.  Going on nothing more than the fact that he's Jewish, the Army convicts  Captain Albert Dreyfus (Joseph Schildkraut) of the crime, and banish him to the prison on Devil's Island, in South America.
 Eventually, Col. Picquart (Henry O'Neill) discovers evidence implicating Major Esterhazy (Robert Barrat) as the actual spy, but is ordered by his superiors to remain silent, in order to avoid embarrassing the French military.

Dreyfus's wife Lucie (Gale Sondergaard) asks Zola to take up her husband's cause. Though he is reluctant to give up his life of luxury, he sees the injustice, and pens an article for the newspaper accusing the Army of a massive cover-up.  He is charged with libel.

Then there are long and confusing courtroom scenes, but in the end Zola is found guilty.   Rather than serve his prison term, he flees to London so that he can continue to write about the Dreyfus Affair.   Eventually, new administration admits that Dreyfus was innocent, the officers who were involved in the cover-up either commit suicide or resign, Dreyfus is returned to the France, given a promotion in the Army and knighted as a member of the Legion of Honor.  At his ceremony, Dreyfus wonders why Zola did not attend, and at that moment the newspaper boy announces the headline, "Zola Found Dead!"  He had died of carbon-monoxide poisoning, thanks to a faulty stove.

I think the film would have been better - or at least more interesting - if they'd concentrated more on the Dreyfus Affair than, well, the life of Emile Zola.  The pace of this film is very slow, and filled with lots of flowery speeches about liberty, and justice, and the power of ideas, and blah blah blah.

Not a great one!