In early February 1937, Georg Gyssling, an ardent Nazi and the German consul in Los Angeles, called Warner Brothers. He had heard that the studio was making a film about the French government’s wrongful conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, for the transmission of military secrets to the German government in 1894. The film was obviously going to condemn one of the most notorious instances of anti-Semitism in the recent past, and Gyssling was determined to take action. He told the receptionist at Warner Brothers that he wanted to speak to the producer.
The producer picked up the telephone: “He wanted to make a date with me immediately, and wanted further information in regard to this, I presume, in order that he might notify Washington or his government,” the producer explained later in a memo. “I succeeded in telling him that the Dreyfus case plays a very small part in our picture. This seems to have satisfied him very much and I hope that we won’t hear from him any further.”
Just a few days after this call took place, the studio head Jack Warner dictated some important changes to the Dreyfus picture (which would eventually be titled The Life of Emile Zola): Scene 80: Start the speech of the Chief of Staff with “He’s a man!”, losing the line “And a Jew!”
Scene 190: Do not use the word “Jew” in the speech by the Commander of Paris. Use Dreyfus’s name instead.
Scene 235: Use Dreyfus’s name here again instead of “… that Jew”. After Warner’s changes had been implemented, the word “Jew” was not spoken a single time in The Life of Emile Zola. The only reference that remained was a shot of a piece of paper on which Dreyfus’s religion was written. And just before the film was released, there was a request for this to be cut too: “Take out the last part of the insert where the finger runs across under the line, ‘Religion Jew.’” But for some reason the request was not carried out, and hard as it may be to believe, this one-second shot turned out to be one of the few explicit references to a Jew in American cinema for the remainder of the Thirties. (more..)
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