USA 116m Dir: William Dieterle Key Cast: Paul Muni
This Best Picture is a biopic of the French Nobel-prize winning writer. It opens with Zola living in virtual poverty with artist Paul Cezanne but fairly quickly finds him forge a successful writing career. The bulk of the film is about Zola being tried in court after writing an article criticising the French army over the Dreyfus Case. Dreyfus was a Jewish officer who was convicted of espionage despite any real evidence and probably because he was Jewish.
I have to say I didn't think much of the film. It's not really the life of Emile Zola, it's mostly one chapter in his life, and the focus regularly drifts to Dreyfus and the senior army officers covering their own backs. It felt to me like they should have either told Zola's life story or should have made Zola a character in Dreyfus' story rather than the other way around.
This period in Hollywood films is marred by the way they avoided angering Nazi Germany. It feels to me like the whole intention of the film is to speak out against anti-Semitism which was hugely on the rise thanks to the likes of Hitler. Despite this intention and the fact that anti-Semitism feels like a necessary part of the story they are telling, the film carefully avoids mentioning anti-Semitism and doesn't even use the word 'Jew' in dialogue.
It's interesting to note how the Academy Awards don't seem to have changed a great deal in all this time. Here's a pretty average film which undoubtfully has a good heart but utterly bungles it's theme, coming across more of a token effort than a real attempt to take a stand, yet the Academy decided it was the best film of the year. That same sentence could certainly be used to describe far more recent winners too.
I liked the history the film highlights but the way it tells it is not very good, from trying to keep Nazi Germany happy to simply being quite dull.
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