The Life of Emile Zola (1937)

Directed by

William Dieterle

Genre

drama film, biographical film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 56m

Rated

NR

Rating

6.7 of 10 from 156 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

The film follows the life of French author Emile Zola, showing his career as a writer and his later involvement in the fight to free a wrongly convicted army officer. It focuses on his dedication to justice and truth.

earnestinspirationalstatelycerebralmoralhistoricalrestrainedsomber

What happens

The Life of Emile Zola is a 1937 American biographical film about the 19th-century French author Émile Zola starring Paul Muni and directed by William Dieterle. It premiered at the Los Angeles Carthay Circle Theatre to great critical and financial success. Contemporary reviews ranked it as the greatest biographical film made up to that time. In 2000, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Produced during the Great Depression and after the Nazi Party had taken power in Germany, the film failed to explore the key issue of antisemitic injustice in France in the late 19th century, when Zola became involved in the Dreyfus affair and worked to gain the officer's release. Some recent studies have noted the film as an example of Hollywood's timidity at the time: antisemitism was not mentioned in the film, nor was "Jew" said in dialogue. Some explicitly anti-Nazi films were canceled in this period, and other content was modified. This was also the period when Hollywood had established the Production Code, establishing an internal censor, in response to perceived threats of external censorship. The Life of Emile Zola became the second biographical film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, after The Great Ziegfeld. It was also the first Warner Bros. Pictures release to win Best Picture. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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