Thursdays in January | 19 Movies
This eclectic and extensive series, covering a period from the late 1930s to the end of the century, doesn’t purport to paint a full and clear picture of the Jewish experience. What it offers most of all is a glimpse of how filmmakers have sought to portray Jewish life and its representation on screen over the course of 60 years. Through an array of styles and genres – ranging from period dramas to comedies and even a musical and a Western – the series shows how filmmakers have attempted to deal with such themes as assimilation, antisemitism, religion, family life and the Holocaust, sometimes with clarity and honesty, other times with varying degrees of distortion and caricature.
Notably, few of the films programmed in January are from the classic age of Hollywood, a period when Jewish characters on screen were marginalized, reduced to cruel and ridiculous stereotypes or rendered invisible. The situation is further complicated by the knowledge that many, if not most, of the original founders and longtime executives of the major movie studios (Fox, Laemmle, Lasky, Mayer, Goldwyn and the Warner brothers) were Jewish, children of immigrants, who gravitated toward show business and the pioneering of a new industry where they could thrive, unlike so many areas of American professional life that were closed to them.
The reality of the time was that, however assimilated into American life they may have been, Jews* were subject to discrimination and hostility (still manifest, even rekindled, in the 21st century). Hollywood’s system of official and unofficial self-censorship pressured producers to eliminate or disguise the Jewishness of their characters, e.g., turning a play about Jewish summer resorts in the Catskills into a screen comedy about working class New Yorkers on vacation (Having Wonderful Time, 1938) or ignoring the fierce anti-Jewish violence at the heart of the real-life 1915 lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia when it was fictionalized on screen in They Won’t Forget (1937).
There were a few exceptions – The Jazz Singer (1927), The Great Dictator (1940) – but for the most part, Jews did not begin to garner much positive screen time until the breakdown of the studio system and the rise of independent production later in the 20th century. Until then, stories about Jewish life were largely confined to the Yiddish cinema, an offshoot of the popular and prolific Yiddish-language theater that produced roughly 130 feature films and numerous shorts for immigrant and overseas audiences during its 1911-1940 heyday.
Fittingly, this series is bracketed by two movies representing this cultural movement, opening with the screen adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and closing the final night with the original source material, Tevya** (1939), adapted by Ukraine-born director-actor Maurice Schwartz from a play based on Sholom Aleichem’s classic stories of life in the shtetls of Russia. Long thought to be a lost film, a print was discovered in 1978, and in 1991 it was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress National Film Registry for its historical, cultural and aesthetic importance. A major commercial success in the year of its release, Fiddler on the Roof was the first foray into musicals for director Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night, 1967; The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968).
It took until 1947 for Hollywood to address the Jewish experience in any meaningful way, depicting the damaging effects of antisemitism in two rather different stories. The more prestige of the two, Gentleman’s Agreement, produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, the non-Jewish studio boss of 20th Century Fox, was a critical and popular success (including an Oscar for Best Picture) that brought anti-Jewish discrimination into the open. The other, more compelling release was the film noir Crossfire, in which a Jewish character is murdered by a brutal bigot. Interestingly, the victim in the novel on which it was based was a homosexual, a telling indication of what was acceptable on screen and a subject for further analysis elsewhere.
Following the screening of these two films on the first night of the series is I Accuse! (1958), a dramatic rendering of the 1894 trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French Army falsely accused of treason. Puerto Rican actor José Ferrer, who was always drawn to films with social messages, directed the picture and cast himself as Dreyfus, partly to make up for what he considered a soft-pedaling of his Jewish character in an earlier film appearance, The Caine Mutiny (1954). Despite his good intentions, I Accuse! was a box office flop, but it is notable for detailing the effects of antisemitism on the case and for fully restoring Dreyfus’ Jewishness after it had been glossed over in an earlier, more successful film on the subject, The Life of Emile Zola (1937).
Much of the remaining three nights of programming is devoted to more lighthearted fare. Woody Allen is, of course, represented, having built a career on the anxiety and disaffection of the New York Jewish intellectual. Perhaps his most iconic film, Annie Hall (1977), derives much of its humor from the disconnect between his lead character’s cynicism, death obsession and alienation and his need to live in the public world as an entertainer and to find love with a naïve and quirky shiksa. It’s Allen’s personal experience but filtered indelibly enough through his Jewishness to create a virtual late 20th century stereotype. His body of work has also served as a template for similar movies, such as 1982’s Soup for One, about a young man’s improbable quest for the perfect woman, set to a memorable soundtrack by the likes of Debbie Harry, Chic, Teddy Pendergrass and Nile Rodgers.
The theme is taken up with a twist in the romantic comedy Over the Brooklyn Bridge (1984), by Israeli-born writer-producer-director Menahem Golan. A young business owner (Elliott Gould) is pressured to give up his gentile girlfriend in order to get financing for a new project. With the exception of model-actress Margaux Hemingway as the shiksa in question, the main cast is almost exclusively Jewish, including Gould, Sid Caesar, Carol Kane, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shelley Winters, who played a number of Jewish mamas and matrons in her later career.
With a decidedly non-romantic focus but in the same vein of Allen’s New York-based angst, Bye Bye Braverman (1968) trades a little heavily on Jewish caricatures and ethnic jokes in its story of four friends (led by George Segal) who travel to the funeral of a fifth member of the group, a writer who died suddenly. The writer character is said to have been based on the author Isaac Rosenfeld, who also reportedly inspired the main character in Saul Bellow’s novel “Henderson the Rain King.” The film was directed by Sidney Lumet, whose parents were veterans of the Yiddish theater. The screenplay was adapted from a novel by Wallace Markfield, who has been called the James Joyce of the at-one-time primarily Jewish neighborhood of Brighton Beach in Brooklyn.
That location served another Jewish writer well in a career that turned out hugely successful comedies for stage and screen. Neil Simon focused a semi-autobiographical trilogy on characters from the neighborhood, beginning with his play Brighton Beach Memoirs (brought to film in 1986) and continuing with Biloxi Blues (1988) about a Jewish boy (Matthew Broderick) in Army bootcamp in the South during World War II. Like so many of the pictures in this series, particularly the comic ones, the film touches on issues of identity and assimilation. And in case viewers think the casting of the WASP-like star of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) smacks of “Jewface” (the pejorative term for casting gentile actors as Jewish), Broderick’s mother was an Ashkenazi Jew.
New York women get their moment, too, in two releases created by and starring Jewish artists. The studio-produced Crossing Delancey (1988) got the most acclaim, with a Golden Globe nomination for lead Amy Irving and mostly positive reviews. Janet Maslin in The New York Times praised director Joan Micklin Silver and writer Susan Sandler for combining “a down-to-earth, contemporary outlook with the dreaminess of a fairy tale” in this story of a young woman who longs to be a leading figure in the city’s literary circles and winds up falling for a humble pickle salesman (Peter Riegert) introduced to her by a professional matchmaker (Sylvia Miles).
As an independent production, Girlfriends (1978) flew a bit under the radar. The comedy-drama about a struggling photographer and her relationship with a gentile frenemy and ex-roommate stars Melanie Mayron, later a regular on the hit series Thirtysomething and Jane the Virgin and now a successful TV director. The film was written by Vicki Polon and directed by Claudia Weill.
Easily the oddest comedy in the line-up, The Frisco Kid (1979) stars Gene Wilder as a rabbi loose in the Old West who is befriended by bank robber Harrison Ford, riding an early wave of stardom after his breakthrough in Star Wars (1977). Although often too dependent on ethnic humor, the film has been described by critic Jordan Hiller as one of 25 Essential Jewish Movies for its "uncommon innocence and unselfconscious humility."
The series also includes films adapted from the works of several of the top Jewish authors of their time. The Angel Levine (1970) was produced by Harry Belafonte, who co-stars as an angel coming to the aid of a poor Jewish tailor (Zero Mostel, Tevye in the Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof) and his ailing wife (Ida Kaminska, who had deep roots in her native Poland’s Yiddish theater). The Chosen (1981) was based on Chaim Potok’s best-selling 1967 novel set in Brooklyn in the 1940s about Jewish identity and clashes between traditional and contemporary values. It stars Robby Benson, whose chosen stage name does not reflect his Jewish parentage. The comedy Portnoy’s Complaint (1972), based on Philip Roth’s 1969 bestseller, was a follow-up to the successful Roth adaptation Goodbye, Columbus (1969), which also starred Richard Benjamin. Despite a script and direction by Ernest Lehman (Sweet Smell of Success, 1957; North by Northwest, 1959), it was criticized for failing to capture Roth’s style and tone, particularly the lead character’s complex relationship to his Jewish-American heritage.
There’s nothing in this series directly depicting the Nazi death camps, no Schindler’s List (1993) or Son of Saul (2015), but the Holocaust is very much present in films by two of France’s most acclaimed directors. François Truffaut’s historical drama The Last Metro (1980) follows the struggles of a small Parisian theater company whose manager (Catherine Deneuve) is hiding her Jewish husband (Gérard Depardieu) from the city’s Nazi occupiers. Au revoir les enfants (1987) is writer-director Louis Malle’s autobiographical story of his boyhood at a Catholic school whose headmaster attempted to shelter Jewish children.
The series also includes a French-Canadian release, Set Me Free (aka Emporte-moi, 1999), a coming-of-age tale about a young Jewish girl struggling with her sexuality and idolizing Anna Karina’s character in Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962).
* Those offended by the use of the term – understandably so, since it has been weaponized as a slur for so long – should consider the number of linguists and Jewish writers and scholars who have noted it is also a perfectly acceptable and accurate word, on a par with “Christian” and “Muslim” in their noun forms.
** Changed, for unknown reasons, from the original spelling, “Tevye.”
