Prestige Picture

(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.

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.

As the boys of Shakespeare's theatre played women, so the boys of the Yiddish theatre have for centuries played old men. Muni made his stage debut at the age of eleven in Cleveland, as an old man in a sketch called Two Corpses at Breakfast. He took to the stage as naturally as a grocer's son takes to the counter. But his parents had other ambitions for him. To the Jews of that generation any kind of musician was higher in the social scale than an actor. Paul was to be a violinist. He took his lessons dutifully but one day went to his father with his violin and told him he wanted to stay on the stage. The old man sadly took the violin, broke it across his knee. In later years the Weisenfreunds were partially recompensed by having their other two sons become musicians. Joseph is now a musical arranger at Warner Brothers' studios. Al is also in Hollywood, looking for a job as a violinist.

When Muni was 18 he was making an average of $15 a week. He was a success. In 1917 he showed up on Manhattan's lower East Side where he was soon spotted and signed up by Maurice Schwartz of the Yiddish Art Theatre. For seven years Muni plugged hard at his work. In 1926 Sam Harris gave him the lead in the play We Americans. The play was a hit and Muni's future was virtually assured. Success did not change him much. He did not gamble or drink or imitate the ways of the Gentiles. For several years he had been married to a slender, dark-eyed girl named Bella Finkel who had played opposite him in the Yiddish Theatre. After We Americans, Muni Weisenfreund went to Hollywood where, renamed Paul Muni, he made The Valiant and Seven Faces, neither of which won him cinema fame. He returned to Broadway in 1931 for the smash success Counsellor-at-Law, and after that made his first hit movie, Scarface. Since then he has made I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Hi, Nellie, Bordertown, Black Fury, Dr. Socrates, The Story of Louis Pasteur and The Good Earth. Pasteur won him the Academy prize and furnished a precedent for Zola. Muni now gets about $100,000 a picture.

Worrier. No other actor in Hollywood worries so much about his work as Paul Muni. He believes that in order to give a fine performance he must hypnotize himself into the mood of the role. On the set he does not laugh or tell stories or play mumblety-peg, as other actors do to while away the intervals of their work. He sits apart brooding. Before taking a role he studies all the research which the writers used in preparing the script. Once he went to a Warner Brothers producer and complained: "I don't understand this role." "I thought we went over it pretty carefully," said the producer. "I know," replied Muni, "I understand the character all right. But I have no idea about his ancestors."

On any Muni set the second most important person is Mrs. Muni. If she likes a "take" she nods. If not, she shakes her head and even though Muni and the director are satisfied, the scene is done over.

Muni is dreamy, sensitive, unpractical. When he bought a ranch in San Fernando Valley he mistook the irrigation stand-pipes for flower pots and planted geraniums in them. When the water was turned on, the geraniums flew into the air. He sold the ranch last spring for a hilltop home in Palos Verde, where he swims in his pool, plays with his dog and looks through a telescope at ships on the Pacific. He is never seen in Hollywood nightspots and takes no part in actors' disputes. He attended the mass meeting of the Screen Actors Guild last May but sat among the extras and left by the side door. He wears black hats turned up all the way around like a rabbi's, occasionally a beret.

Muni considers himself a very funny fellow, earnestly citing quips, practical jokes and an incident in which he jumped into a swimming pool with his clothes on. At his own insistence Warners allowed him to make a comedy called Hi, Nellie in which he played a wisecracking city editor. The experiment was not repeated.

Retirement? Reading scripts, Muni grades them like a schoolteacher, awarding "A1" to those scenes which have good dramatic values and also fit him perfectly. His contract allows him to reject any role he does not like. He rejects four out of five. What his next part will be is not known. With the completion of Zola, Muni began a long vacation. In October he and his wife will start on a trip round the world, avoiding war zones. During shooting of Zola, Muni gave several intimations that Zola's epitaph in the film might mark his own permanent farewell to Hollywood. The possibility of his retirement at his career's crest is not taken seriously at movie colony dinner tables. Last week Muni seemed to be of two minds. "I am going away for a while," he said, "and stay until I'm sick of it. If I like it better I may stay permanently."

This sounded very much like the talk of a man whose zeal for his art impels him to seek a change of atmosphere but will not permanently keep him from work. This impression was strengthened by the fact that Muni has been considering an-other role, that of Haym Salomon, a Jewish banker and friend of George Washington who helped finance the Continental Army. Last week Warner Brothers announced that Salomon would be impersonated by Muni next, but it was shortly revealed that Muni had turned down the role on the ground that U. S. citizens might object to the implication that a Jew was the master mind behind the Father of His Country. Nevertheless, Hollywood could not believe he would be reading parts if he seriously meant to retire.

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