(See front cover)
The cinema has a special category for what it calls "prestige pictures." Made with an eye to pleasing serious critics, these productions are intended primarily to stimulate the self-respect rather than fill the purses of their makers. Prestige pictures are such films as The Green Pastures, Winter set, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Camille and the like. Many prestige pictures lost money. Many are bores.
Last week Warner Brothers released a movie which is probably the outstanding prestige picture of the season. It is also one of the best shows. The Life of Emile Zola has an even greater claim to the attention of adult cinemaddicts because its star, Paul Muni, having won last March the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' award for the most distinguished performance of 1936 (The Story of Louis Pasteur), can be considered, at least until next March, the First Actor of the U.S. Screen.
The Life of Emile Zola is an original treatment for the screen of the career of a great 19th-Century French novelist whose name will be less familiar to most of the cinema public than the great 19th-Century French scientist whom Muni characterized so successfully last year. It is not with Zola the novelist that the story concerns itself, but with Zola the man who blew the lid off the greatest political scandal of its time, France's famed L'Affaire Dreyfus.
Zola, in the opening scenes, is the son of a middle-class French family, living in writer's poverty in a Paris garret. He shares both the garret and a single pair of trousers with Painter Paul Cezanne (Vladimir Sokoloff). One day Zola listens to the story of a girl of the Paris streets, sees in it the material for a novel and writes his first great success, Nana (a tale with which Producer Samuel Goldwyn and beauteous Actress Anna Sten had less success 54 years later).
To Zola, in time, come great fame, wealth, position and what he takes for contentment. Some years later, the young radical has become a fat and fussy literary lion. His greatest satisfaction is no longer tilting at literary and political windmills but the prospect of election to the august French Academy. While Cezanne, after dinner one night, is telling Zola that his head is as overstuffed as his stomach, L'Affaire Dreyfus is having its beginnings. The General Staff of the French Army, discovering that someone has been selling military secrets to Germany, looks around for a scapegoat, finds one in Captain Alfred Dreyfus (Joseph Schildkraut), the only Jew on the General Staff. Dreyfus is tried, convicted on built-up evidence, degraded and sent to Devil's Island.