Paul Muni

The Life of Emile Zola (1937)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-11-182023-03-18 Movie Review

(YouTube Streaming, November 2019) I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to The Life of Emile Zola, expecting an average 1930s biopic, but that was without counting on Paul Muni’s take on Zola, and the lively indignation of the script as it focuses on l’affaire Dreyfus. It helps that this presentation of Zola portrays the French writer as a crusader fighting for justice, and that the Dreyfus story becomes a high-stakes political scandal that touches upon the corruption of the French elite. Still, there’s only so much you can do with a good premise, and so the film does quite well on execution, with a sharp script that’s not above rearranging facts for dramatic impact (or portraying an exile as heroic) and Muni’s superlative performance at a time when Muni was one of the reigning actors in Hollywood. Looking up additional details about the Dreyfus affair and Zola’s role in it, I was disappointed that the entire Jewish angle of the original scandal was completely excised from the movie … and that the tidiness of the tragic conclusion is a fabrication. Still, the film itself is largely exact in portraying the monstrous injustice that Zola contested, and very entertaining in depicting Zola himself. It all amounts to a capable early example of Hollywood firing on all cylinders—The Life of Emile Zola was the first film nominated for ten Oscars, and walked away with three Awards, including Best Picture. It’s probably one of the early Best Picture winners that has aged best.

Movie Review

Scarface (1932)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-06-222023-03-19 Movie Review

(On TV, June 2019) The real star of Scarface may not be Paul Muni as a Capone-inspired gangster, nor superlative director Howard Hawks, nor legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht, but multi-talented producer Howard Hughes and his instinct for anticipating what the American public really wanted to see. By today’s standards, Scarface is promising but familiar fare—the last ninety years have led to a very large number of gangster pictures offering vicarious thrills by portraying (sometimes with a bit of moralistic tut-tutting) the life of gangsters. Martin Scorsese built a career on such movies, and they seem hardwired in Hollywood’s DNA. Examples reach into the silent era (notably Hughes’ The Racket), but Scarface, along with the slightly earlier Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, helped codify the genre even as real-life gangsters were laying waste to urban areas. It was tremendously successful, and just as influential—all the way to a much better-known 1983 remake penned by Oliver Stone and directed by Brian de Palma. This original is much rougher—hailing from the early days of sound cinema, it does have a wild energy to it, and a good turn from Muni. While modern viewers won’t appreciate the innovation of the film in staging complex action sequences (including some savvy special-effects work!), the result on-screen looks and feels a lot like more modern movies. Pre-Code audiences liked it (even Al Capone was reportedly a fan), but Scarface raised so much controversy that it was shelved by Hugues and effectively disappeared for decades before resurfacing in the post-Production Code 1970s. Now, contemporary audiences can see what had been unavailable to prior generations and appreciate the result for themselves, as a hard-hitting gangster film that pushed the envelope and remains absorbing in itself. I’m sure Hughes would approve.

Movie Review

I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-06-122023-03-19 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, June 2019) As much as I like using movies to point out the similarities between past decade and modern times, there are times when films will remind you that the past was something else entirely. It’s bad enough that I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang highlights that there was such a thing as chain gangs, or “a group of prisoners chained together to perform menial or physically challenging work as a form of punishment” as Wikipedia bloodlessly puts it. The barbaric reality on the ground was far more horrific, and this 1930s prison melodrama clearly has a provocative intention in highlighting the inhumanity of southern state’s legal systems: as with many other 1930s prison movies, this one carries the spirit of reform. The plotting is an upsetting blend of prison escape thriller and uplifting by-the-bootstrap melodrama, as our likable protagonist (another great Paul Muni performance) ends up in a chain gang, escapes, is tricked back into another one and escapes again, forever condemned to live in the underworld. Director Mervyn Leroy has a sure hand on his material, making interesting choices on how to portray elapsed time for a multi-decade story, taking us through WW1 and Depression-era America with its day labourers and relaxed moral code. The Pre-Code nature of the film feels vigorous here, being far more suggestive than later movies (what is she doing in his room … oh) and character behaviour (such as spouses cheating on each other) that would be nearly eliminated from moviemaking a few years later. Chain gangs aren’t the least of the film’s dated nature—hearing a female character bluntly state “I’m free, white and 21” had me spending a significant amount of time going down a rabbit hole of 1930s slang that really hasn’t aged well at all. Perhaps the biggest shock of the film comes at the very end, which comes abruptly and refuses us any comfort after the triumphant escape that precedes it—you can see here a very early glimmer of the moral fatalism that would later come to dominate American film noir and unsettle audiences. Despite a few misfires (such as uninteresting female characters), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang easily fulfills the expectations set by its exploitative title, and has us carefully measuring the distance between ourselves and bad ideas of the past.

Movie Review

The Good Earth (1937)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-02-032020-09-06 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, February 2019) In looking for adjectives to describe The Good Earth, “grotesque” is one of the best I can find. It certainly wasn’t made to deserve such a description, nor was it received as such at the time … but time moves on. Today, an American writer would think twice about writing a novel entirely set in rural China, but Pearl S. Buck (writing from Nanking) was up to the challenge—and had the empathy to pull it off all the way to a Nobel Prize for Literature. The result was even a best-seller. Today, no Hollywood studio would dare shooting a China-set film with all-Chinese character using largely California-built sets and all-Caucasian main actors. But here we are: In the 1930s, I have a feeling that The Good Earth was perceived as daring, world-aware, perhaps even progressive in depicting an entirely different reality from the average American moviegoer. Today, though… The entire film seems like a gleeful act of extreme cultural appropriation, with such white-bread actors as Paul Muni and Luise Rainer playing Chinese farmers in obvious makeup. It doesn’t help that this long and epic depiction of Chinese peasant life will tax anyone unwilling to have a long sit. While the plot does have its highlights (locust swarm, civil war, etc.), it does remain a very mannered take on a long story and it takes a fair amount of fortitude to pay attention throughout. Still, for today’s audience it’s the brazenness of having a (nearly) all-Caucasian cast play Chinese characters that gets the most attention. At least we can fall back on the idea that the film does portray its characters with a fair amount of sympathy and well-researched details: for all of the weirdness of the casting and setting, the stereotypes are kept at bay and the film seldom turns to cheap Orientalist clichés along the way. Still, grotesque isn’t a bad adjective. It may best be applied to Katharine Hepburn in the not-dissimilar Dragon Seed, but it’s certain appropriate for The Good Earth as well.