The Life of Emile Zola

The Life of Emile Zola

1937. USA. Directed by William (Wilhelm) Dieterle. With Paul Muni, Gale Sondergaard, Joseph Schildkraut, Morris Carnovsky, Donald Crisp, Vladimir Sokoloff. By the time he made Emile Zola, Dieterle was a major figure at Warner Bros. The biography of the great French novelist and polemicist (which has many scenes that reflect Dieterle’s training under Max Reinhardt) culminates with the Dreyfus affair; appropriately, many of the actors are Jewish. Heinz Herald, one of the Oscar-winning writers, had been a writer-director in Weimar, and Sokoloff had been in several G. W. Pabst productions, including Westfront 1918, The Threepenny Opera, and Don Quixote. 116 min.