Most people assume that George Arliss was involved in motion pictures for only about a decade, from his performance in DISRAELI (1929) to his retirement after the failure of OLD ENGLISH in 1938. In actuality, he had made several of his sound films as silent films, in particular DISRAELI (originally made as a silent in 1921) and THE GREEN GODDESS. A few of his sound movies could not have been made as silents - THE MAN WHO PLAYED GOD requires sound, because Arliss's pianist is losing his hearing after an explosion. A silent movie would have made this loss of a vital sense meaningless.
It has to be admitted that he was typecast a little after his Oscar winner in 1929. He became the actor who portrayed "great men" of history (preferably English, but not necessarily so). So he played Disraeli snatching the Suez Canal, the Duke of Wellington watching helplessly as his worthy old opponent (Marshall Ney) is judicially murdered by the restored Bourbon Monarchy, Cardinal Richelieu fighting court intrigue and making 17th Century France the center of Europe, Meyer and Nathaniel Rothschild building history's greatest private banking empire (and using their power to force Jewish Emancipation on Europe), and Alexander Hamilton giving America it's stable economic force (while defending his reputation against the scandal of the Mrs. Reynolds Affair). People tend to forget his performance as Bette Davis's lover and protector in THE MAN WHO PLAYED GOD, or the Rajah of Ruhk in THE GREEN GODDESS or the proud old New England aristocrat in THE LAST GENTLEMAN. He did portray fictional roles as well as historical ones.
Voltaire (1933) is a lesser-recalled historical film. Arliss is the wit and writer and critic of the ancien regime, involved in trying to rehabilitate the name of an executed criminal: Jean Calas. This was an actual tragedy of the reign of Louis XV in 1764. Calas, a wealthy French merchant, was a Protestant. His son, an unstable youth, had been considering converting to Catholicism. One day the young man was found dead by hanging in a room in his father's home. The chances are pretty good that young Calas committed suicide, but in that period such tragedies were hushed up - due to their nature suggesting hidden weaknesses in the families of the deceased. Calas Sr. made the mistake of trying to cover-up the suicide. When the death became known, the authorities made the erroneous jump of thinking Calas Sr. killed his son to prevent the young man from becoming a Catholic. The elder Calas was arrested, tortured, given a rapid trial, convicted, and executed. His family were ruined by the tragedy. Voltaire, in real life, examined the entire affair and showed the shallow guesswork and investigation of the facts that led to a judicial murder. Although the government was unhappy to be shown to be in the wrong, they decided to agree to posthumously rehabilitate Calas Sr.'s memory. The family was also given some money as compensation (though not much).
The screenplay is using Voltaire's fight for Calas as the center of the drama, pitting Arliss against King Louis (Reginald Owen) and his chief minister Count de Jarnac (Alan Mowbray). Actually Mowbray's character is fictional, as no such chief minister existed in France in 1764 with that name or title. Much of the screenplay is fanciful, but does show some interesting historical images: Voltaire writing a play set in the ancient mideast (based on the Calas tragedy) and producing it to be shown at Versailles before the court (this was actually done by Voltaire, Moliere, Racine, Corneille, and Beaumarchaise through the reigns of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI). Also of interest is Voltaire shown getting correspondence from Frederic the Great of Prussia (they did correspond frequently - ironically they were friendlier when writing to each other than when Voltaire spent three years in Prussia in the early 1750s). Reading Frederic's letters by a fireplace, Voltaire also is reading the monarch's poetic effusions, which Voltaire must doctor up. Arliss is funny at this point, reading bathetic verses to himself and saying, "This is terrible", before calmly dropping the letters into the fireplace. This scene alone makes watching VOLTAIRE worthwhile.
