I Accuse! (MGM, filmed 1957, released 1958)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 12) at 7 p.m. I put on Turner Classic Movies for two films starring José Ferrer, I Accuse! (1958) and Moulin Rouge (1952). TCM showed these and other films by Ferrer, including his Academy Award-winning performance in Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), largely under the rubric of “Hispanic Heritage Month” because Ferrer was born in Puerto Rico and therefore qualified as both “Hispanic” and “Latino.” (A recent episode of Late Night with Stephen Colbert featured one of his Latino writers explaining the difference; “Hispanic” means coming from a country anywhere in the world that speaks Spanish, while “Latino” means coming from Mexico or Central or South America. So Antonio Banderas, born in Spain, is “Hispanic” but not “Latino,” while soccer star Pele, born in Brazil, is “Latino” but not “Hispanic” since Brazil speaks Portuguese, not Spanish.) The showing was co-hosted by Alicia Malone and Luis Reyes, author of a book called !Viva Hollywood! about the contributions of Hispanics and Latinos to American filmmaking. Surprisingly, I Accuse! and Moulin Rouge turned out to have quite a lot more in common than just Ferrer’s presence in the casts. Both films are biopics; both take place in the same place and time (Paris, France in the 1890’s); and both cast Ferrer as a victim of discrimination – anti-Semitic discrimination in I Accuse! and discrimination based on physical disability in Moulin Rouge. There’s even a direct connection between the two films: I Accuse! opens with a scene showing a Parisian parade in which one of the marchers is carrying a sign with a poster for the Moulin Rouge by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the artist Ferrer had played six years before in Moulin Rouge.

I Accuse! is based on the infamous case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (José Ferrer, though for some reason the producing studio, MGM, billed him as “Jose,” without the accent), a 35-year-old Frenchman from a Jewish family in Alsace (a border province that in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War was conquered and occupied by Germany, who had to give it back to France under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles following Germany’s defeat in World War I) who, on the basis of incredibly flimsy evidence, was accused of treason, convicted by a court-martial and sentenced to Devil’s Island on French Guiana (now independent Guyana) in 1894. The real spy, Major Ferdinand Esterhazy (Anton Walbrook in a marvelously oily performance, his last in a feature film), manages to leak false information to a Parisian newspaper to ensure Dreyfus’s conviction. The entire case against him is based on a handwritten letter, known as le bordereau, fished out of the trash at the German embassy by a French cleaning lady who was really a spy for French intelligence. The bordereau was a list of French military secrets the spy was offering to sell to the Germans for money. Another letter identifies the spy as having the initial “D,” and so French counter-intelligence officials go down the list of members of the French general staff who have an initial “D” in their names – and they light on Dreyfus and almost immediately assume he’s guilty because he’s Alsatian and a Jew. An alleged “handwriting expert” on the general staff named Major DuPaty de Clam (Herbert Lom, later the Phantom of the Opera in the 1962 Hammer film and the crazy cop Inspector Dreyfus – no kidding – in the Peter Sellers Pink Panther movies) extracts from Dreyfus a sample of the text of the bordereau and proclaims the two were written by the same person. Dreyfus is convicted and the evidence against him is sealed so no pesky activists can get hold of it and embarrass the French military.

Dreyfus gets shipped off to Devil’s Island and the only two people on his side at first are his wife Lucie (Viveca Lindfors, giving a rare sense of weight and dignity to a role that could have easily just turned into a typical long-suffering spouse part) and his brother Mathieu (David Farrar, who despite the similar last name is no relation to José Ferrer but nonetheless looks enough like him they’re believable as brothers). Mathieu runs a profitable business on the Alsatian border – at least it’s profitable until the factory burns down, and even that gets added to the case against Alfred because the French military prosecutors allege the insurance company was just a front to transmit Alfred’s spy payments. In vain Alfred Dreyfus protests to the court that he’s a patriotic Frenchman and joined the army rather than living off his brother’s relative wealth because he wanted to serve his country. Dreyfus himself gets sent to Devil’s Island and there he’s subjected to a particularly cruel sort of punishment in which his legs were bound to a hard bed frame with shackles so he had to sleep without being able even to move about in bed. Meanwhile, a French officer named Major Georges Picquard (Leo Genn) starts noticing the flaws in the case against Dreyfus. When he sees a copy of a letter Esterhazy wrote to the German ambassador, he becomes convinced Dreyfus is innocent and Esterhazy is the real spy. Nonetheless, he’s punished for his efforts to bring justice to the case by being sent to a war zone in French North Africa, where the general staff hopes he’ll be killed in combat and put an end to his pesky efforts to reopen the Dreyfus case.

The Dreyfus case starts attracting the attention of French intellectuals, and in 1898 internationally famous novelist Émile Zola (Emlyn Williams) writes a notorious article denouncing the officers and civilian politicians who collaborated against Dreyfus, framed as an open letter to the president of France and called “J’Accuse!” While the real Esterhazy is acquitted of espionage at a court-martial and allowed quietly to resign from the French officer corps and move to London, Dreyfus wins a retrial in 1899 but is only convicted again. Scared by the prospect of a return to Devil’s Island, he accepts the French government’s offer of a pardon even though accepting a pardon means he’s admitting guilt. Ultimately, in 1906, Dreyfus wins a complete exoneration from the French Supreme Court and allowed to rejoin the military – where, ironically enough, he served as an artillery officer in World War I using the same sort of cannon whose secret he allegedly stole and sold to the Germans. I Accuse!, directed by Ferrer himself from a script by Gore Vidal based on a novel about the case by Nicholas Halasz, is a great and powerful movie. There’s a certain hectoring quality about some of the acting, though according to the Wikipedia page on the Dreyfus affair the stiffness of Ferrer’s acting as Dreyfus is in keeping with what we know about the real man: “[T]he reputation of Dreyfus as a cold and withdrawn or even haughty character, as well as his ‘curiosity,’ worked strongly against him. These traits of character, some false, others natural, made the charges plausible by turning the most ordinary acts of everyday life in the ministry into proof of espionage. From the beginning, a biased and one-sided multiplication of errors led the state to a false position.”

Other than that, I Accuse! is an excellent historical film, far more scrupulous than most in adhering to the true story, well staged, well acted (especially by Ferrer and Walbrook) and a marvelous parable about the stupid things all bureaucracies do to maintain their aura of infallibility no matter how many people get hurt, or their lives destroyed, along the way. I Accuse! was a box-office flop, I suspect largely because America in the 1950’s was itself locked in a state of paranoia about “enemies” both external and internal, and a story about defying the military and the government in the name of justice for an individual and a community (the real Dreyfus affair led to a series of quite nasty riots targeting France’s Jews and ultimately the formation of a Right-wing party, Action Française, that lasted for decades and supplied many of the collaborators the Nazis recruited when they occupied France between 1940 and 1944) was obviously going to be a hard sell in the U.S. at the height of the “Red Scare.” It’s indicative of how raw the wounds over the Dreyfus case still were 60 years later that José Ferrer shot the movie in Britain because the French government refused him permission to make it in France!