The Life of Emile Zola 1937
Who the heck was Emile Zola? That’s why biographies are useful.
From the 10th film to win an Oscar for Best Production, we learn that Émile Zola (eMIL Zola) was a great 19th century French writer, thinker and activist.
Today, he’s famous for nothing we would remember, but back in the 1800s, he wrote “J’Accuse.” Like Bob Woodward reproaching Richard Nixon for being a corrupt president, Zola exposed the French army for falsely convicting the Jewish Capt. Alfred Dreyfus for passing military secrets to the Germans. The army then covered up its mistake by exonerating the real traitors.
Zola had risked his career and his life; he was convicted and fled to England. After he proved to be right, the French government fell.
Zola was just a shipping clerk who got a job in a newspaper advertising department. He also wrote book and art reviews, and finally became a political journalist. He first crossed literary swords with Napoleon III, president of the French Second Republic, who engineered a coup d'état that made him emperor.
Twenty of his novels commented on French life: violence, alcohol, prostitution and the Industrial Revolution. "I want to portray, at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself in its rush to possess all the good things that progress is making available and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world."
Sounds like 2011 America, doesn’t it?
The most successful was the ninth (1880) novel, “Nana,” a streetwalker who destroyed every man who pursued her.
The Life of Emile Zola is a forgotten film about a forgotten man, played by Paul Muni, the forgotten Tom Cruise of his time. It may be the least known of all the Academy Award winning Best Pictures.
Shoulda Woulda Coulda
Zola’s competition included Captains Courageous, The Good Earth, Lost Horizon, Stage Door and the original Janet Gaynor version of A Star is Born.
1937 was one of those stellar years in films. It also included Topper, Greta Garbo in Camille, Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas.
Trivia
The Good Earth was the last film supervised by legendary producer MGM Irving J. Thalberg. The first of Oscar’s lifetime achievement awards went to Darryl Zanuck.
The Awful Truth was nominated for Best Production, Irene Dunne for Best Actress, Ralph Bellamy for Best Supporting Actor, and Leo McCarey for Best Director and Screenplay, but the male lead, Cary Grant, was ignored. He wouldn’t be nominated until Penny Serenade (1941).
Best Song went to "Sweet Leilani" from the musical Waikiki Wedding. Snubbed: "They Can't Take That Away From Me," sung by Fred Astaire and written by George and Ira Gershwin in Shall We Dance.
A Walt Disney masterpiece, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, was nominated only for Best Score, and it lost. Animated films, Cary Grant, science fiction and Stephen Spielberg didn’t win easy respect.
Both Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn were overlooked for their performances in Stage Door.
Camille, directed by George Cukor, one of the all-time greatest romantic tearjerkers, received only one nomination for Best Actress, which Garbo lost.
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