Best Picture: "The Life of Emile Zola," 1937

Movie Stats:

Released 1937 (USA)

American, in English

Director – William Dieterle

Stars – Paul Muni, Joseph Schildkraut, Gale Sondergaard

Plot Summary:

Pretty much as advertised by the title. The story follows the famous French author Emile Zola (Paul Muni) from his early days as a starving artist with his buddy, the painter Paul Cezanne (Vladimir Sokoloff), through his successes and excesses, and finally into his involvement with the Dreyfus Affair and his untimely death a few years after his criminal libel trial in 1898. Joseph Schildkraut stars as the wrongly-accused Capt. Alfred Dreyfus and Gale Sondergaard is his wife, Lucie.

Bad Stuff:

If you don’t know anything about Emile Zola (as I did not) or the Dreyfus Affair (which I very dimly recalled from history class), you might want to brush up before watching, because the movie assumes your familiarity with both topics.

Melodrama. Lots of melodrama.

It drags a bit once it gets to Zola’s 1898 trial. Up until that point, it zips along at a rather admirable pace.

Good Stuff:

Paul Muni was excellent as Zola. I compared pictures; he even looked a lot like him. I read later that Muni was well known in his day for “inhabiting” his characters.

It did a good job of making both Zola and Dreyfus sympathetic, even though they were frequently reviled in their time. I found myself feeling angry on their behalf. You know a movie is good when it makes you feel something for its characters, whether that something is good or bad.

The female characters were pretty tolerable. Of course, they don’t have a whole heck of a lot to do for most of the movie (except for Lucie, towards the end), but I’ll take it as a victory.

The Verdict:

Honestly, I really enjoyed this one, almost in spite of myself. I’d dreaded seeing it for so long because it sounded boring. On the contrary, until it got to the trial, I thought it was very engaging and even kind of fun. The slowness of the trial scene didn’t drag it too far down in my estimation, though. If I were going to recommend Oscar winners, this one would probably end up in my top 15.

I give it 3.5 stars.