Friday, November 30, 1945
DETROIT JEWISH CHRONICLE and The Legal Chronicle
educated! Whether he portrayed
the zealous French bacteriolo-
gist who braved the sneering
stodgy academicians, or showed
the simple Chinese peasant's
struggle with nature: whether
he transformed himself into the
fearless French novelist fighting
for innocent Captain Dreyfus, or
into the stolid idealistic Mexican
Indian who defied European des-
potism and imperialism and es-
tablished a dmeocracy in Mexi-
co, Muni always carried an im-
portant message to the public,
a message that could not be
misunderstood. Perhaps this
"man of many faces," this "man
who is always somebody else"
is so great, so unforgettabl e be-
cause of his faculty of com-
pletely submerging his ego into
the personality he is portraying.
You may say, after leaving the
movie house: Laughton was
wonderful, wasn't he?, or: Arliss
is a remarkable man!, but after
leaving Muni's movies, you feel
like exclaiming: That great
idealist Pasteur! That brave
man Zola!
After his appearance in "The
Story of Louis Pasteur," Muni
was proclaimed the best of the
male actors in 1936 by the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences. He was excellent
in nearly all of the movies in
which he was starred subse-
quently, as the bewildered little
English country physician who
fights an intolerant mob ("We
Are Not Alone"), as Pierre Ra-
dison, the unshaven French trap-
per and practical idealist who
was responsible for the forma-
tion of Canada's Hudson Bay
Company ("Hudson Bay"), ..s
a leader of the Norwegian Un-
derground ("Commandos Strike
at Dawn"), as a Russian guerilla
("Counter-Attack"), and as Cho-
pin's teacher ("A Song to Re-
member"). If none of his later
performances reached the artis-
tic height of his earlier ones,
this was due, not to a lessen-
ing of his genius, but to the
weakness of the scripts that did
not permit him to develop his
gifts completely. However he was
as brilliant as ever as he ap-
peared on Broadway again, in
Maxwell Anderson's anti-Fascist
play, "Key Largo," in which he
had the part of a disillusioned
fighter for the Spanish loyalists
who, back in the United States,
discovers that there are greater
things than mere life.
Asked which, in my opinion,
was Muni's strongest scene, I
would say, without a moment's
hesitation: the speech he deliv-
ered to the jury, in the role 3f
Zola, a speech, incidentally, that
ran about seven minutes and, so
far, was the longest speech ever
recorded continuously in motion
pictures. Remarked Muni, with
reference to that speech:
"I had to learn the speech so
well that when I was addressing
the jury I would never at any
time realize that I was an
actor delivering lines. I must be
Zola, fighting for justice for
Captain Dreyfus, who was suf-
fering on Devil's Island."
Muni is only fifty; he looks
younger, and he will remain one
of the great artists of Holly-
wood for many years to come,
I am sure. We need intelligent
men like him, who are willing
to fight, whenever any of our
liberties is in danger. He is an
idealist who never played a part
he disliked, who reads the script
first in order to determine
whether it is feasible for him,
who challenges his directors, his
critics, his public, if necessary.
He is not only gifted—he is
sincere. "In life people don't
act, they react," he once said.
"Actors must do the same." At
another time he asserted: "I try
to grasp the mind of the char-
acter I'm playing. I think his
thoughts, and unconsciously they
motivate my hands, my voice,
my face, my body. You cannot
become a good actor, I believe,
if you merely imitate a charac-
ter, if you are thinking: Now
I'll move a hand, now I'll shrug
my shoulders, now I'll get my
face close to the camera .. . "
Above all, he is not a cynic.
Oscar Wilde once defined a cyn-
ic as a person who knows the
price of everything, and the val-
ue of nothing. Sascha Guitry
was a cynic who, knowing his
prise, sold himself to the Nazis.
Muni will not sell himself to
anyone, including those people
who are interested in box-office
returns only.
While he is beloved and ad-
mired by millions all over the
world, there are a few people
in this country who don't like
Muni. They are those who dur-
ing the war objected to Holly-
wood's "propaganda" movies,
and who now, after the war,
claim that films should be solely
entertainment, that their sole
function should be "to restore
laughter to the world." Senator
Nye didn't like Muni. Nor does
Gerald L. K. Smith who is now
soliciting funds to wage a fight
on Hollywood which he describ-
ed as being "completely dom-
inated by Jews, most of whom
are refugees or immigrants
from Poland, the Balkan States
and Russia." Our G. L's did not
care whether Muni was foreign-
them. Last summer I saw an
old movie starring Muni. The
good people of Lisle, Illinois, as
American a town as Hatred-
Smith could imagine one to be,
applauded wildly. For there is
one thing that all people on the
globe, in a Midwestern town as
well as in a jungle of New
Guinea or in a forgotten village
in the Caucasus have, or ought
to have, in common with Muni
Weisenfreund of Lemberg: HU-
MANITY!
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