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Zola becomes conscious of the Dreyfus case when the Captain's wife (Gale Sondergaard) begs his aid. All his old fighting instincts aroused, Zola writes his famous editorial J'accuse ("I accuse"), charging the army with conspiracy and daring anyone to try him for treason. The army takes the dare. Zola's trial lasts 30 minutes on the screen, with speeches longer than cinemaddicts are supposed by most Hollywood producers to be willing to hear. Zola's rhetoric is no match for the mass of lying evidence and the judge's prejudice. Convicted, he flees to England. But presently a new French Government orders the Dreyfus case reopened and the prisoner is acquitted. In real life Zola lived on for three years before he was asphyxiated by a leaky flue. In the picture he dies on the eve of Dreyfus' reinstatement in the army. His epitaph, pronounced in the Pantheon by Anatole France (Morris Carnovsky), gives the picture a magnificent last line: "He [Zola] was a moment in the conscience of man."
Paul Muni says that in any performance he will be satisfied if he leaves with his audience one unforgettable moment. Audiences of Zola will probably recall at least three: the scene in which the nervous young novelist, unaware that his Nana has become an overnight sensation, begs a loan of two francs from his publisher; the scene in which he tries to convince Mme Dreyfus and himself that his days of fighting are over; the courtroom speech in which he justifies his interference as a private citizen in L'Affaire Dreyfus. A Memorable also is Joseph Schildkraut's scene in which Dreyfus, white and dim after four years on Devil's Island, tries helplessly to comprehend his own pardon.
Muni's superb characterization of the older Zola is a result of the most careful and concentrated preparation. A lover of makeup, he added extra hair to his own black beard and worked out an arrangement which took three hours each day to apply. He studied all the existing records of Zola's life and the Dreyfus case. At home he spoke his lines into a dictaphone and played them back for sound. He mastered characteristic gestures: the irritated twirling of the pince-nez, the contemplative tapping of the stomach, the sudden bursts of laughter.
Yiddish Theatre, Like many other Jews who have reached artistic eminence, Muni developed his art in close contact with his own race. He was born Muni Weisenfreund in a part of Austria which is now Poland in the little town of Lemberg, which he left at the age of one month and has never seen since. His parents were traveling actors who journeyed from one European capital to another, performing in the ghettos. The nomadic life of the Weisenfreunds took them to London, where Muni went to his first school, and later, when Muni was six, to the goal of all the nomadic Jews of Europe, to the U. S.