Paul Muni was the king of screen biographies in Hollywood's Golden Era, creating a gallery of great lives. Warner Bros. was the studio most in touch with the common clay, striking a public nerve with films of social protest. These forces of star and humanism converged in a 1937 movie landmark: The Life of Emile Zola was the studio's first Best Picture Academy Award winner (10 nominations and three wins).

This powerful film about the activist French author also won the New York Film Critics Best Picture prize. And Muni won that group's Best Actor honors for his towering portrayal of Zola, France's champion of the oppressed, whose relentless campaign to free the wrongly convicted Captain Dreyfus (Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner Joseph Schildkraut) will forever shine as "a moment in the conscience of man."

Paul Muni stars as Emile Zola, giving possibly his best performance in this excellent biography of the great writer, which won three Oscars, including Best Picture. The film's most unusual aspect is its evasiveness regarding the anti-Semitism that led to the terrible injustice of the Dreyfus affair. As Neil Gabler and others have pointed out, this can probably be attributed to the reluctance of the Jewish studio moguls to incur the ire of a society in which they still didn't feel entirely accepted. The film tracks Zola's early years, including his friendship with Paul Cezanne (Vladimir Sokoloff), and his uphill battle to expose in print the social ills that plagued France's lower classes. When success arrives with the publication of NANA, he garners an audience that can appreciate his exposés of the corruption of the nation's government, military, and business community. But it's in the Herculean effort to clear Captain Dreyfus (Joseph Schildkraut), a victim of anti-Semitism who had been framed on charges of military espionage and sent to Devil's Island, that Zola reveals in full force the tremendous courage that undergirded his achievment. High production values, an excellent cast, and an intelligent script all add to the film's extraordinary quality.