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PAUL
MUNI
The disguised hero
°aul Muni in The Good Earth, film that brought Luise Rainer her second Oscar.
Iollywood, with its usual imperception, tried to make *aul Muni into a new Lon Chaney — a man with a thousand aces. Muni, always terribly serious about his work, rebelled it this and, as he tells it, literally did handsprings in his iving room when he bought out his Warner Brothers contract n the late thirties. A shy man who said that "all the things
J hat usually appeal to an actor make me shrivel inside," he mdoubtedly found it comforting to hide beneath his sundry, I ind exceedingly clever, make-ups.
Through most of them, however, shone certain qualities l9n which the audience could always depend. Whether he was (Zola, Pasteur, Juarez or a Chinese peasant, he generally exhibited a lovable crustiness, a mildly eccentric nonconformity that made his character seem, no matter how remote the time Ipr place in which he was set, comfortingly familiar to us. Jn the end we perceived beneath the disguise an uncle or a grandfather, wise, humorous, patient, given to endearing little outbursts of temper. His great use in the films was to make the unfamiliar seem suddenly as recognizable and comfortable as the drama of our own living room.
Muni made a career of playing men older than himself or, at least, ones who aged considerably in the course of the work in hand. As a child and young man he appeared in literally hundreds of the Yiddish theater productions with his family. The first was at the age of twelve, and naturally he played a little old man. His first Broadway success was also as a gaffer, whom he mimed so skillfully that one critic expressed outrage that "this old man should have spent a lifetime waiting for a chance to appear on Broadway."
His acting technique was based on an uncanny talent, both physical and vocal, for mimicry and imitation; it is his exhausting habit to read and study for months before creating the outer shell of the character in which the unchanging Muni hides. Aided by his wife, he zealously and jealously protects his privacy, and he was careful, in the comparatively brief years of his great success, to build an economic security enabling him to live a modest life without depending on acting for sustenance. In truth, his considerable art is based on concealment not revelation, and it is unlikely that he ever once exposed any aspect of the real Paul Muni to public gaze.
Muni in his first great film success, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932).
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