Warner Bros. was one of the original Big 5 Hollywood studios that included 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, MGM and RKO. Using their vertically integrated industrial machines to produce, distribute and exhibit motion picture entertainments, these five houses controlled much of the cinematic marketplace from the 1920s through the mid-1940s. Acting in concert with the Little 3 studios of Columbia Pictures, MGM and United Artists that each lacked vertical integration, these eight movie houses captured most of the box office dollars spent by eager moviegoers seeking celluloid fantasies. Together they created a dreamscape of glamour, adventure and romance the likes of which were previously unknown in the United States.

Along with controlling the marketplace these eight studios carved out entertainment niches for themselves according to the needs and talents of their contracted staff. Thus genres gradually became associated with particular stars, directors and houses. Relationships were begun with the news media, including active public relations outreach to cultivate movie stars. Stability was brought to bear on a speculative marketplace and audiences came to rely on a rate of production that, for the Big 5 studios, ran close to one new feature film a week.

During this period Warner Bros. was considered the least affluent of the major studios although its periodic innovations, most notably that of sound films in the late '20s, contributed to its viability throughout the Depression years. The lean spending practices of the studio from its head, Jack Warner, through individual producers contributed to this tone of moderation with the result being a close connection between Warner Bros. pictures and low budget entertainment. The most provocative, well regarded and often times least expensive of these "smaller" films were the social problem movies for which Warner Bros. was justifiably famous.

Perhaps leading the stylistic charge in the early '30s were the newly formed genres of the gangster film and biopic that found sound films particularly fertile ground. Capitalizing on the relatively cheap, realist-oriented and action-packed new forms, the former with its focus on violence and the latter with its predilection for movers and shakers of history, Warner Bros. churned out crime addled action-adventure stories and literary pedigreed biopics with surprising speed and success.

The era's foremost star of screen biographies was Paul Muni, the popular actor who first cut his teeth with an Academy Award winning role in The Valiant in 1929 and then rocketed to stardom with his title role in 1932's Scarface. Making something of a mini-career during his three decades long filmography, several of his more famous performances stem from appearances in biopics. Beginning with the prisoner of bad timing in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang in 1932 and then picking up steam with Dr. Socrates in 1935 and The Story of Louis Pasteur in 1936, Muni arrived at the height of his powers with his starring role in The Life of Emile Zola in 1937.

Telling the true story of Emile Zola from his humble beginnings in the early 1860s through his world-renowned literary fame, social activism and death at the turn of the century, William Dieterle's movie is actually a picture told in two halves. Based on Matthew Josephson's book Zola and His Time with a screen story by Heinz Herald and Geza Herczeg and a script by Herald, Herczeg and Norman Reilly Raine, the movie first concerns the author's rise from poverty into acceptance as an important man of letters. In this transition Muni portrays the writer as an idealistic and supremely confident man whose rise to prominence is as much owed to his artistic excellence as to the topicality of his literary subjects and humanitarian interests. The second half then switches focus to examine an aged Zola, complete with a corpulent frame, gray hair and a general indifference towards his earlier struggles with corruption and the terrors of impoverishment from which he sprung.

Hinged to the clarion call of the Dreyfus affair of 1898, the biopic flips from being about a famous man and turns into an attack on uncaring bureaucracies that willingly sacrifice the innocent in favor of corrupt national values. Where an older, more refined and wealthy Zola is at first indifferent to the outrages committed against Alfred Dreyfus (Joseph Schildkraut), a Jewish career army officer railroaded as scapegoat for a leak in the French war department, he ends up a critic of the establishment and, therefore, a criminal himself.

Detailing the way in which Dreyfus was singled out in a scandal that threatened to topple the French military's domination over civilian life, Zola expresses outrage and becomes the spokesman for resisting arbitrary rule. Using his characteristic wit and fame to speak directly with the French people in newspapers and in his books, he's put on trial for defending Dreyfus's innocence and is finally found guilty of committing liable. Fleeing his native country to continue the struggle abroad, his efforts finally result in the freeing of Dreyfus from his internment on Devil's Island although Zola himself is accidentally poisoned to death from a carbon monoxide leak.

Never more than cursory in its depiction of the writer's early life, and often simply symbolic of larger philosophical positions with concern to the Dreyfus affair, Dieterle's film is an unbalanced biopic with two warring foci. It favors a vignette structure to pack whole decades of Zola's life into a few moments of screen time and then allows the final third of the film to bog down in a courtroom showdown between Zola and the French army. With this turn away from an historical person and towards one of the more striking events of his life, The Life of Emile Zola fails to reveal very much at all about the man.

Instead the film lingers over the Dreyfus affair, minimizes the anti-Semitic elements of the case, and emphasizes the Chinese box-like structure of corruption inherent in the late 19th century French army. It's not a particularly surprising bit of conjecture when considering the intrigues of world politics in the last 100 years and it makes the story of Zola's life nothing more than the preamble to an important moment in the development of civil liberties and the practice of law. Minimizing the titled character and making him second fiddle to wider events is a disservice to this biographically inspired feature film. But it's also a disservice to the social problem described by the Dreyfus affair that's over-simplified to the point of being unconnected to contemporary troubles that stem from it.

By compressing Zola's career and personal experience into a few interesting scenes, the result hints at the many other events that shaded his life making these excluded possibilities as compelling as anything Muni actually lives through on screen. So too do the Dreyfus-related events in the film scream out for a more chronologically specific and detailed investigation into one of the national changing events of the last 19th century. That neither focus of the biopic is convincingly produced means The Life of Emile Zola is a movie with a wide, structure absence at its center.

Not quite successful in its biographical first half or in its social problem second half, the picture ends up relying on a charismatic lead performer, rich production design and a melodramatic score by Max Steiner to encourage audience satisfaction. That the picture is nearly successful is a testament to the way Dieterle's staff worked cohesively to render his vision of Zola's life on-screen. That there is still plenty of room to wonder about what makes the renowned author tick and what the implications of the Dreyfus affair are on modern life is an equal testament to what the movie fails to deliver in its nearly two hours running time.

Though these negative factors certainly influence the lasting value The Life of Emile Zola such notes are, quite possibly, nothing more than a judgment about approach to biographical subjects in light of what was delivered to movie theaters in 1937. As an emblem of its moment when studios tackled sensitive issues with the most commercially viable means Warner Bros. used its poverty-row house style and built a critically acclaimed social problem-biopic hybrid to showcase one of the era's most impressive stars. The result is undeniably tied to its moment and yet there are fine moments when Muni brings Zola to life as man with conflicted notions about the world and his place in it.

On the awards circuit of 1938 there were many nominations but fewer long lasting legacies to the art of the past. Warner Bros.'s picture was thrust into competition for the Outstanding Production citation and faced off against the still remembered works Captains Courageous, Dead End, The Good Earth, Lost Horizon and A Star is Born. Filling out the list of 10 nominees with relatively obscure titles were The Awful Truth, In Old Chicago, 100 Men and a Girl and Stage Door with the now conspicuous absence of credit offered to the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers vehicle Shall We Dance.

As in all cases of historical memory we must remember that retrospection, hindsight and the changing face of cultural interest judge the past and renounce or celebrate its record in light of more current values. What we learn from Dieterle's biopic with its charismatic Paul Muni performance isn't so much that it's a great piece of lasting artistic significance appealing to generations of moviegoers. Instead the film instructs us about the immediate post-Depression era when theater audiences and the critical establishment saw fit to laud work exposing the underside of corrupt bureaucracies and the importance of living up to one's conscience no matter the cost.