Paul Everton | Through the Shattered Lens

The Life of Emile Zola, the winner of the 1936 Oscar for Best Picture of the Year, opens with two French artists living in a drafty apartment.

Emile Zola (Paul Muni) is destined to become one of France’s most popular and important writers. Paul Cezanne (Vladimir Sokoloff) will eventually become one of the most important artists of the post-impressionist movement. But for now, they’re just two struggling artists who have sworn that they will never sell out their principles. They are poor but they’re happy. That changes for Zola after he meets a prostitute named Nana (Erin O’Brien-Moore) and he uses her life story as the inspiration for a novel. The book is controversial and its frank content scandalizes France. The public censor comes close to banning it. But it also becomes a best seller. It’s the book everyone secretly owns but claims to have never read.

Zola writes several more books, all about the conditions of the working class in France. Eventually, he becomes what he claimed he would never be, a wealthy man living in a mansion and having little contact with the poor and oppressed. Cezanne sees Zola one last time, calling him out for having sold his talent for money. Cezanne explains that, on general principle, he can no longer be Zola’s friend.

Meanwhile, a quiet and rather meek family man named Captain Alfred Dreyfus (Joseph Schildkraut) has been arrested and accused of being a spy for Germany. There’s little evidence that Dreyfus is a spy. Indeed, most of the evidence seems to point to a Major Walsin-Esterhazy (Robert Barrat). But, because Dreyfus is considered to be an outsider, he is convicted in a show trial and exiled to Devil’s Island.

(In real life, it’s generally agreed that Dreyfus was a victim of anti-Semitism. As the only Jewish member of the army’s General Staff, Dreyfus was viewed with suspicion by his colleagues even before anyone knew that there was a German spy. The Life of Emile Zola doesn’t specifically state that Dreyfus was a victim of anti-Semitism, with the exception of a brief moment when one of his accusers looks at his personnel file and says, “He’s not one of us,” while pointing at the word “Jew.” Otherwise, the fact that Dreyfuss was Jewish is never mentioned in the film. It’s as if the film is going out of its way to avoid offending the very people that the movie is criticizing.)

After speaking to Dreyfus’s wife (played by Gale Sondergaard, who would later become the victim of a show trial herself when she was blacklisted as a suspected communist), Zola decides to take up Dreyfus’s case. He publishes an open letter — J’Accuse — in which he states that Dreyfus was not given a fair trial and that Dreyfus is innocent of the charges against him. Zola finds himself in court, accused of libel. Zola uses his trial to give Dreyfus the hearing that he never received. While the army boos his every utterance, the people of France rally to his side.

The Life of Emile Zola is an early example of the type of prestige production that today is often referred to as being an “Oscar picture.” It tells a true story. As a film that condemns the treatment of Alfred Dreyfus but avoids stating the obvious reason why Dreyfus was targeted in the first place, it’s political without being radical. And it features a performance from the most acclaimed actor of the era, Paul Muni. Muni gives a powerful performance as Zola, holding the viewer’s attention even during the lengthy trial scenes that take up most the second half of the film. That said, the true star of the film is Joseph Schildkraut, who plays Dreyfus as being a kind and trusting soul who finds himself caught up in a Kafkaesque nightmare. At one point, Dreyfus is given a gun and told that there’s one way that he can avoid being put on trial for treason. Schildkraut played the scene so well that I wanted to cheer when he refused to surrender.

The Life of Emile Zola is a big and, at times, self-consciously important production. It was clearly designed to win a bunch of Oscars and it certainly managed to do that. Compared to some of the other films nominated that year — The Awful Truth, Dead End, A Star is Born, Lost Horizon, Stage Door, In Old Chicago — The Life of Emile Zola can seem a bit stodgy. However, the performances of Muni and Schildkraut continue to make the film worth watching.

The title of the 1937 film They Won’t Forget works on many levels.

It describes the reaction of a small Southern town, following the brutal murder of teenager Mary Clay (played, in her film debut, by Lana Turner). The town won’t forget Mary and they won’t forget the terror caused by her murder. They also won’t forget that local teacher Robert Hale (Edward Norris) was accused of the crime.

The district attorney, Andrew Griffin (Claude Rains), hopes that the people of his state won’t forget his efforts to see Griffin convicted of that crime. Griffin wants to be elected to the U.S. Senate and he knows that the high profile case could be just what his career needs.

The Governor (Paul Everton) knows that, if he steps into the case and acts on his suspicion that Hale is innocent, the voters of his state will never forget. And they certainly won’t be willing to forgive.

And, on a larger level, the title lets us know that the South and the North will never forget the Civil War and the conflict between the two regions. The film opens with three elderly veterans of the Confederate Army, preparing to march in the town’s annual Confederate Memorial Day parade and admitting to each other that, after all these years, it’s difficult to remember much about the war other than the fact that they’re proud that they fought in it.

It’s while the rest of the town is busy watching Griffin and the governor ride in the parade that Mary Clay is murdered. It’s easy to assume that Hale was the murderer because Hale was one of the few townspeople not to go to the parade. You see, Hale is originally from New York City. When he’s accused of murder, it’s equally easy for Griffin and tabloid reporter William A. Brock (Allyn Joslyn) to convince the town people to blame this Northern intruder for both the murder of Mary Clay and, symbolically, for all of the post-Civil War struggles of the South itself.

Meanwhile, up North, Hale is seen as a victim of the South’s intolerance. A high-profile lawyer (Otto Kruger) is sent down to defend Hale but, as quickly becomes clear, everyone involved in the case is more interested in refighting the Civil War than determining the guilt or innocence of Andrew Hale.

They Won’t Forget is a hard-hitting and fascinating look at politics, justice, and paranoia. It’s all the more interesting because it’s based on a true story. In 1913, a 13 year-old girl named Mary Phagan was murdered in Atlanta. Leo Frank was accused and convicted of the murder. (In Frank’s case, he was born in Texas but was also Jewish and had previously lived in New York before moving to Atlanta, all of which made him suspicious in the eyes of many.) On the word of a night watchmen, who many believe was the actual murderer of Mary Phagan, Leo Frank was convicted and sentence to death. After spending days reviewing all of the evidence and growing convinced that Frank had been wrongly convicted, Georgia’s governor committed an act of political suicide by commuting Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment. Leo Frank was subsequently lynched and the man who had prosecuted the case against him was subsequently elected governor.

Well-acted and intelligently directed, They Won’t Forget is probably one of the best films of which few people have heard. Fortunately, it shows up fairly regularly on TCM and, the next time that it does, be sure to watch. It’s a great film that you won’t easily forget.