Background
Muni, Paul was born on September 23, 1897 in Lemberg, Austria. Son of Phillip and Salli Weisenfreund.
Muni, Paul was born on September 23, 1897 in Lemberg, Austria. Son of Phillip and Salli Weisenfreund.
The child of actors, he came to America early in the 1900s and played in Yiddish stock for many years. Only in 1926 did he play a part in English. This novelty and the greater one of sound prompted Fox to hire him: in 1929 he made The Valiant (William K. Howard), for which he was nominated for an Oscar, and Seven Faces (29, Berthold Yiertel), in which he and his makeup box played seven people—including Don Juan, Schubert, Napoleon, and boxer Joe Gans (it was a movie about a waxworks).
Despite, or because of, such a virtuoso debut, Fox were happy to let him go and it was only after his Broadway success in Elmer Rice’s Counsellor at Laic that Howard Hawks cast him as Scaiface (32). It is remarkable that that film should have been considered a glorification of the gangster, since M uni’s flagrant overplaying is so remote from the sort of man that interests Hawks. Muni then excelled in Mervyn Le Roy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (32) and was contracted by Warners. He followed with two more Le Roy films—The World Changes (33) and Hi Nellie! (34)—with Bette Davis in Border Town (35, Archie Mayo), and in 1935 encountered a director worthy of him: William Dieterle, who indulged Muni in Doctor Socrates (35), The Story of Louis Pasteur (35), and an Oscar, The Life of Emile Zola (37) and Juarez (39). These films were born out of an attitude to Great Men of History—pious, unsubtle, and naive—that is unlikely to be revived. What Muni brought to them was the unchecked confidence that a great actor was as noble as any other benefactor of mankind. He was also a self-conscious, well-cushioned radical who did much to push Black Fury (35, Michael Curtiz), a studv of labor relations in mining that Hollywood muffled. Muni’s impressiveness came from the shameless heroics of identifying himself with Great Causes and Heroes.
Oddlv, all this flourished at Warners where, in five years, Bogart would drive such myths from the temple. Muni also played in Litvaks The Woman I Love (37), was a Chinaman in Sidney Franklin’s The Good Earth (37), and in the underrated We Are Not Alone (39, Edmund Goulding). By the time war came, his fashion had already faded. He was a Frenchman in Pichel’s Hudson’s Bay (41) and then made only another six films before his death: Commandos Strike at Dawn (42, |ohn Farrow); Counter-Attack (45, Zoltán Korda); grotesque as Chopin’s teacher in Charles Vidor’s A Song to Remember (45); Angel on My Shoulder (46, Mayo); in Losey’s blighted Stranger on the Prowl (52); finally as the slum doctor in Daniel Mann’s The Last Angny Man (59).
Muni believed he was a great actor. And in the mid-1980s, at least, he managed to persuade his employer, Warner Brothers, the Academy of Motion Pictures, and a large part of the cinema audience. In retrospect, he looks owlish in his overacting, ridiculous in his makeup, and insanely awful in his feelings. Thus, he is a crucial negative illustration in any argument as to what constitutes screen acting.
Married Bella Finkel, May 8, 1921.