I’m heading off soon to a conference this weekend, so I thought I’d have Film Friday a day early. Since, my paper addresses Warner Brothers’ 1937 film Life of Emile Zola, I thought I’d show a few scenes.
Zola was yet another entry into a cycle of biopics that Warners specialized in. More than Story of Louis Pasteur, however, the life of Zola, and especially his activism during the Dreyfus affair, allowed the studio to use Zola as double for its own social consciousness filmmaking from earlier in the film. Paul Muni playing Zola investigating mine conditions echoes Paul Muni playing a miner himself in Black Fury. And here, his discover of the misery of the poor combines Wild Boys of the Road and I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang:
Even the last dissolve of this scene is Warners social consciousness style at its best. For the most part, though, the film is as tedious stylistically as its script is tedious theatrically. Something about the combination of Warners’ low budgets with its high culture aspirations seemed to produce the most stultifying prestige picture possible.
Still, director Dieterle was not without his moments. A simple, quick track shot serves as punctuation to a key narrative moment and a reminder how fluid and graceful classical Hollywood could be, even at its dullest.
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If you hadn’t guessed, this Colonel von Schwartzkoppen is the bad guy.
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