Word: pauls
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Zola, in the opening scenes, is the son of a middle-class French family, living in writer's poverty in a Paris garret. He shares both the garret and a single pair of trousers with Painter Paul Cezanne (Vladimir Sokoloff). One day Zola listens to the story of a girl of the Paris streets, sees in it the material for a novel and writes his first great success, Nana (a tale with which Producer Samuel Goldwyn and beauteous Actress Anna Sten had less success 54 years later...
...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...
...called Two Corpses at Breakfast. He took to the stage as naturally as a grocer's son takes to the counter. But his parents had other ambitions for him. To the Jews of that generation any kind of musician was higher in the social scale than an actor. Paul was to be a violinist. He took his lessons dutifully but one day went to his father with his violin and told him he wanted to stay on the stage. The old man sadly took the violin, broke it across his knee. In later years the Weisenfreunds were partially recompensed...
...much. He did not gamble or drink or imitate the ways of the Gentiles. For several years he had been married to a slender, dark-eyed girl named Bella Finkel who had played opposite him in the Yiddish Theatre. After We Americans, Muni Weisenfreund went to Hollywood where, renamed Paul Muni, he made The Valiant and Seven Faces, neither of which won him cinema fame. He returned to Broadway in 1931 for the smash success Counsellor-at-Law, and after that made his first hit movie, Scarface. Since then he has made I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang...
Worrier. No other actor in Hollywood worries so much about his work as Paul Muni. He believes that in order to give a fine performance he must hypnotize himself into the mood of the role. On the set he does not laugh or tell stories or play mumblety-peg, as other actors do to while away the intervals of their work. He sits apart brooding. Before taking a role he studies all the research which the writers used in preparing the script. Once he went to a Warner Brothers producer and complained: "I don't understand this role...