Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day Fifty-Four and Fifty-Five: Three Important Men

What do British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Meixan freedom fighter Pancho Villa and controversial French author Emile Zola have in common? Apart from being men and famous biopics of their exploits all feature in this decade's list.

Kicking off then with Disraeli which features an Oscar Winning Performance from George Arliss as the man himself. The film concerns itself with the period in Disraeli's life where he tries to build the British Empire and purchase the Suez Canal, however at the time his rival William Gladstone is big news. Gladstone has a lot more supporters than Disraeli including the head of the Bank of England. As the movie goes on the Russians implant spies in Disraeli's office so they can check on his plans to buy the Canal. As the Suez Canal goes up for sale Disraeli makes a deal with a banker to come up with the funds however the spies inflitrate the banker's firm and declare him bankrupt. Disraeli eventually convinces the head of the Bank of England to give the banker unlimited credit. At the end of the film Disraeli's female companion is awfully ill but he has to leave her in order to see Queen Victoria become Emporess of India, but suddenly his lady friend turns up and the film ends happily. In terms of an early biopic Disraeli was admirable enough. George Arliss' peformance was very worthy and he carried an air of dignity throughout the film. He portrayed a Disraeli who was very wise and thoughtful and also kind to those around him. But at the same time I struggle to remember anyone else in the film apart from the uppity lady spy but that's because it seemed so far fetched. I don't think I can be too critical of this film as it did seem to be quite a large underatking at at time when films were still getting used to sound. However I think if a film made about Disreali's life was made today it would be a lot more professional than this.

Next up is Viva Villa a film about freedom fighter Pancho Villa a Mexican who was fed up with the tyrinical rule of Spanish governers so decided to rise up against them. The film starts with Pancho avenging the death of his father at the hands of one of the generals. Soon Pancho becomes an outlaw attacking willy nilly when and where he sees fit. However his exploits are soon documented by a newspaper man called Johny who strikes up a sort of friendship with Pancho. The newspaper articles catch the eye of General Madero a visionary who wants to end the Spanish rule and tries to convince Pancho to change his ways and instead of killing people who can't defend themselves to just attack people for further victory. Pancho changes his ways and soon becomes a legitimate general but he gets restless and soon becomes an outlaw once again after he steals. Instead of having him killed Madero simply exiles his friend but when Madero is betrayed and killed by one of his own men, Pancho mounts a massive attack on basically eveyrone until he becomes head honcho, this time though without changing his beliefs. I found Viva Villa to be more of an actioner than a biopic although I'm guessing some of the major plot points are accurate overall the style was incredibly toned towards Villa just killing anyone that got in his path. The storytelling was very sloppy with a lot of the history written up on the screen instead of conveyed through the narrative although the sound and cinematography was all very good and the former even won an Oscar. Overall though I found Wallace Beery's performance tiresome, Beery's rough and ready approach worked in The Champ but here it just seems almost caricaturish. I think if they wanted to do a proper dramatic retelling of Pancho Villa's life then they would've got in someone like Paul Muni.

Speaking of Muni, he's popping up once again in the final of this triple bill of biopics playing Emile Zola in the predictably titled The Life of Emile Zola which won the Best Picture prize at the 1938 ceremony. The film is basically an overview of Zola's career starting with his early days being a poor author living with the Spanish painter Cezzane. Both men then hit it big, with Zola writing Nana the book that launched him and caught the eye of both readers and the authorities who didn't agree with some of his ideals and saw him as being very controversial. After the film deals with Zola's antics it forwards a few years and explores his involvement with Alfred Dreyfus the French Captain who was wrongly accused of supplying militray secrets to the German army. Dreyfus' wife appealed to Zola's better nature and revealed that another major had found evidence of who the real culprit was. Zola then wrote an open-letter in the French newspapers with the phrase - J'Accuse which is famous to this day. The Dreyfus case re-opened with opinion split between those who chose to support the army fully and those who thought they had too much power. Eventually there was not enough evidence to release Dreyfus and Zola was also sentenced to months in prison for libel. Zola absconded to lie-low in London but his time in London is depicted as being a particularly low point, but thankfully a new war comission sought the truth and released Dreyfus which allowed Zola to return to France. However the day of the celebrations of Dreyfus' release, the news of Zola's death from radiation poisioning is displayed on the front of a paper so the ending was bitter-sweet. As always Paul Muni gives a stunning performance, for which he was Oscar nominated but lost, much better than in Louis Pasteur but not as good as in Chain Gang. He is ably supported by Joseph Schildkraut as the sympathetic and doomed Dreyfus and by Gloria Holden as Mrs. Zola. This is certainly a paint-by-numbers biopic which has a lot of gravitas but is pretty slow in some points wanting to paint a good picture of the events but doing so without making a lot of edits where need be. At the end of the day though this is still fairly powerful stuff and some of the trial scenes will stick with you after you've watched the film. It possibly just scraped through with a win that year as the other nominees weren't a particularly inspired bunch and certainly not as much of an Oscar winner as this was. However I suspect had it been another year the film wouldn't have done quite as well as it did.

So I'm done with great men for now however a famous British author will be looked at in some depth in a couple of posts time.