Several previous reviewers have pointed out a strange hole at the middle of this picture: the fact that Alfred Dreyfus' Jewishness is never an issue when the French army high command decides he must have been the member of the general staff who sent the top-secret list of weapons to the Germans. (In the real world, that was evidently the deciding factor.) Since the subsequent Dreyfus Affair is regularly cited as one of the high (or rather low) points of anti-Semitism in late nineteenth-century Europe, the producers of this movie would have known that many in the original audiences in 1937 would have been aware of the historical reality, especially since Hitler's persecution of the Jews was by then a significant and recurrent issue in the news from Europe. Why, one might ask, was that element of the story left out?
One could argue that part of it may be because Warner Brothers did not want to offend Hitler and therefore lose access to the German market. (The United States remained officially neutral until we declared war on Germany after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in late 1941.) That doesn't seem to make sense, though, since, as this movie proceeds, it becomes clearer and clearly that it means to condemn blind worship of the military and militarism.
Two years later, the director, a refuge from Germany named William Dieterle who worked to help bring other refuges from Germany to the U.S., directed *The Hunchback of Notre Dame* in such a way as to make Frolo's persecution of the gypsies evoke Hitler's persecution of the Jews. Gringoire's defense of Esmeralda is very clearly a condemnation of the Holocaust.
Why, then, is the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair removed, at least on the surface, in this picture, while the picture is given to Dieterle to direct? And why does Dieterle emphasize and condemn militarism but not mention persecution of minorities? Europe was gearing up for war by 1937, of course. Germany had reoccupied the Rhineland the year before, in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, leading France and England - as well as other European nations - to start to build up their armed forces. What in contemporary European politics was Dieterle condemning here?
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And then, a few other comments:
I don't think Dieterle's telling of Zola's involvement of the Dreyfus story is particularly remarkable. Muni gives a very fine performance as Zola, certainly. But I don't think this script, which won an Academy Award for best writing, or Dieterle's direction of it, for which he got an Academy Award nomination, are particularly good, much less great.
If you don't know the story, watch this, most certainly. But if you know such great movies as Captains Courageous, Lost Horizon, and The Good Earth (it was a good year for Paul Muni), don't expect this to live up to those.
It must have been a strange year for the Academy: they also gave Louise Rainer the Best Actress Award, when she was easily bested by all four of her competitors: Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth, Greta Garbo in Camille (yes, overdone, but great even so), Janet Gaynor in A Star is Born, and Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas, a weeping but powerful picture. I also don't see how Joseph Schildkraut got the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his small portrayal of Dreyfus in this picture against Roland Young as Topper, or even H.B. Warner in Lost Horizon. Why the Prisoner of Zenda got almost shut out of the Oscars that year I don't understand either.
