Word: dreyfusism
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...DREYFUS CASE (400 pp.)-Guy Chapman-Reynal...
...never be right," T. S. Eliot once wrote, "and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong." The Eliot dictum applies just as handily to the great controversies of history, among which the Dreyfus case ranks high. British Historian Guy Chapman would like to change the conventional way of being wrong about the case, not by suggesting that the French artillery captain was guilty after all, but that those who shaped the treason charges against him were not so guilty as half a century...
Even when the evidence seems to refute such arguments, Chapman pursues the Dreyfus case like a detective, tries it like a judge, and breathes life into it like a good novelist. If his book sometimes lacks the courtroom dramatics of Captain Dreyfus by Hungarian Journalist Nicholas Halasz (TIME, Aug. 1), it is because Chapman is busy with a more telling drama on a larger stage-the kind of France in which a Dreyfus case could happen...
...enough when it deals with the large, abstract issues of the case--the corruption of justice, anti-Semitism, and the moral vacuum of French society at the turn of the century. But when it tries to depict the people involved, the result is often ludicrous. At times, as when Dreyfus lumbers across the parade ground where he has just been stripped of his rank and yells "I'm innocent," at the top of his lungs, the picture seems almost embarassing. The fault here is that of Fritz Kortner, who plays Dreyfus. His acting style is so restrained that he just...
...acting is probably not the main reason why Dreyfus is not quite satisfactory today, though it was once bailed as a classic. The picture is, after all, a quarter of a century old. By modern standards, the technical facilities available to Richard Oswald, the producer and director, were extremely crude, and he did the best he could with them. Futhermore, Oswald's decision to make a picture about anti-Semitism was an act of considerable moral courage in the Germany of 1930. When Hitler came to power three years later, the film was banned. Therefore, despite its shortcomings as drama...