Word: munis
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...