Tuesdays in September on Turner Classic Movies: The Jewish Experience on Film

Posted on September 1, 2014 at 9:21 pm

This month, TCM has an excellent series of films about the Jewish experience, every Tuesday.

TCM proudly presents The Projected Image: The Jewish Experience on Film, a weekly showcase of movies focusing on Jewish history and heritage as portrayed onscreen. Co-hosting the films each Tuesday is Dr. Eric Goldman, an expert on Yiddish, Israeli and Jewish cinema, and founder and president of Ergo Media, a video publishing company specializing in Jewish and Israeli video. Goldman is also the author of The American Jewish Story Through Cinema (2013) and Visions, Images and Dreams: Yiddish Film Past and Present (2011).

The screenings are divided into themes, which air each Tuesday beginning on September 2 at 8pm with The Evolving Jew, featuring two versions of The Jazz Singer, the story of a young American performer who defies the traditions of his devout Jewish family. Al Jolson starred in the revolutionary early sound version from 1927, and Danny Thomas took over the role in the lesser-known 1953 remake. That same night, The Immigrant Experience focuses on Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street (1965) and Barry Levinson’s Avalon (1990), telling of Jewish families from Europe and Russia who settle in, respectively, the Lower East Side of New York City and a neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland.

Among films dealing with The Holocaust on September 9 are two powerful classics from the 1960s: Stanley Kramer’s all-star Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), about the trial of war criminals in 1945-46; and Sidney LumetÕs The Pawnbroker (1965), starring Rod Steiger as a concentration-camp survivor. Also screening are Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946), in which he plays a Nazi fugitive, and Edward Dmytryk’s The Juggler (1953), with Kirk Douglas as a Holocaust survivor.

September 16 sees Israeli Classics including two TCM premieres, Thorold Dickinson’s Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955), the first feature film produced in Israel; and Ephraim Kishon’s Sallah (1964), a satire that became the most successful film in Israeli history. Also showing are a pair of films focusing on The Jewish Homeland: George Sherman’s A Sword in the Desert (1949, TCM premiere), which deals with the immigration into Mandatory Palestine during the mid-1940s; and Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960), which concerns the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.

Tackling Prejudice on September 23 are three absorbing films based on novels about anti-Semitism: Laura Z. Hobson’s GentlemanÕs Agreement (1947); Crossfire (1947), based on John Paxton’s 1945 novel The Brick Foxhole; and Arthur Miller’s Focus (2001, TCM premiere). A fourth film, The House of Rothschild (1934), was taken from George Hembert Westley’s play about the celebrated Jewish banking family and its struggles for dignity and equality in the European financial world.

Among Coming-of-Age stories on September 30 are The Young Lions (1958), with Montgomery Clift as a soldier coming to grips with anti-Semitism during World War II; The Way We Were (1973) with Barbra Streisand as a Marxist Jew who shares a bittersweet romance with a handsome Gentile (Robert Redford); and Hearts of the West (1975), with Jeff Bridges and Alan Arkin in a comedy about a young writer who stumbles into a career as a cowboy star.

Related Tags:

Interview: Stars of “Walking With the Enemy” Jonas Armstrong, Simon Kunz, and Simon Dutton

Posted on April 25, 2014 at 7:00 am

Jonas Armstrong, Simon Kunz, and Simon Dutton talked to me about appearing in the Holocaust story “Walking with the Enemy.”

I first asked them about their accents. Two Brits and an Irishman were cast as Hungarian Jews who spoke both Hungarian and German. “We didn’t want to go to accent-land,” Armstrong said. But they did want to sound like they were all from the same place. A Hungarian coach helped them with vowel sounds. But Dutton added, “I think the idea was not to make it too strong.” They did not want to distract the audience, just give a suggestion of Eastern Europe.

Simon Kunz talked about researching the real-life character he played. “Totally it was a piece of history that I wasn’t aware of. Yeah he ran the Glass House and a little bit of Switzerland was created in Hungary, it was a neutral territory. He tried to get the Jews into Palestine by printing these passports in this print factory.”

Armstrong talked about the conflicts his character faced in knowing that for every one he saved, many more would die. “I think the thing I have to remember is it would always be better to save one person out of ten than none at all. I think he would be at sort of loggerheads with himself. In a sense, he maybe would be because he is trying to do as much as is possible but is not doing as much as he thinks is enough. But I mean you can only do so much. For him to think, ‘Oh I’m going to be able to save everybody,’ in all that’s 200,000 Jews. That would just be ridiculous! He would have some sort of sense of rationality to sort of accept that he can only do his best and sometimes his best might not be good enough for him but it is better than nothing.”

Simon Dutton’s character has to make the same trade-offs in his own way, which sometimes leads to disagreement. “We were at loggerheads.”

I asked whether it was difficult to work with the actors who were playing such evil villains. Simon Dutton laughed and pointed to Simon Kunz: “He was best mates with the guy who killed him . It was very funny.”

It is a benefit to have a friendly relationship with the other actors, Armstrong added. “Also to have that light sort of relief between the scenes helps, because they are horrible scenes. You have to be able to sort of just forget before you have to go back to the shooting and tension.”

Related Tags:

Actors Interview

Walking With the Enemy

Posted on April 24, 2014 at 6:00 pm

Why do we keep making movies about the Holocaust?

Because we are still trying to understand one of the most shocking, inhumane tragedies in history. Because it is the essence of heightened, dramatic storylines, with the most depraved real-life villains, the bravest heroes, and the direst moral dilemmas, the most devastating sacrifices. Because we have to ask ourselves, “What would I do?”

And because there are still stories left to tell. “Walking With the Enemy” is inspired by the true story of Pinchas Tibor Rosenbaum, a Hungarian student who escaped from a labor camp to help the “Glass House” workers forging Swiss citizenship papers to get Jews out of the country. He impersonated an SS officer to rescue Jews they were about to execute.

This first movie from the brand new Liberty Studios and first-time director Mark Schmidt is a tense and exciting story of a part of the Holocaust not widely known. Because Hungary’s Regent (played by Sir Ben Kingsley) made an alliance with Germany, the Nazis did not interfere with the country or its Jewish citizens for the first years of World War II. “I aligned Hungary with what I thought was the lesser of two evils.”

But then, as Germany started to be hemmed in by the Allied forces, it took over Hungary and began to send Jews to labor camps and concentration camps. A heroic Swiss diplomat named Carl Lutz (played by William Hope) was given permission to issue 8000 passes to Hungarian Jews with family in Switzerland. He managed to get those passes to tens of thousands, who were able to escape the Nazis.

Handsome and likeable Jonas Armstrong (television’s “Robin Hood”) plays Elek Cohen, a character based on Rosenbaum. While his uncle worked with Lutz in the “Glass House” (called that because it had been a glass factory), helping to hide Jews, Elek wore a Nazi uniform to infiltrate Nazi offices and operations to free Jews about to be sent away or killed. Over and over, he takes terrible risks, knowing that even if he survives, he will fail more than he succeeds. “Why does it have to be you?” someone asks. “Because I have one thing left.”

The first-time director wisely worked with experienced filmmakers, especially cinematographer Dean Cundey (“Apollo 13,” “Jurassic Park”) and a capable cast of top British actors. The film is ably scripted, shot, and edited. The sound effects are exceptional; I don’t remember ever hearing gunshot sounds so sharp and directed. The story is very affecting. One oddly sterile note is that for a story about Jews, there is very little Jewish activity other than a blessing over a family dinner. Reminiscences of the Holocaust include many stories of Jews praying together and doing their best to observe rituals and worship, reciting the Shema as they were led to the gas chambers. Here, even those about to be shot by a firing squad do not say a prayer, an odd oversight in a story that is about those who were trying to preserve their right to maintain their religion and their community.

Parents should know that this is a WWII movie depicting events of the Holocaust. There are many scenes of wartime and anti-Semitic violence and many characters are injured and killed.

Family discussion: What was Elek’s toughest decision? Is it hard to help, knowing how much more cannot be fixed? What can we learn from Elek and Lutz? Who is most like them today?

If you like this, try: “Schindler’s List” and “Conspiracy”

Exclusive Clip: Ida — The Story of a Nun Who Learned Her Family Was Jewish

Posted on April 24, 2014 at 12:29 am

I am delighted to be able to present an exclusive clip from “Ida,” the new award-winning film written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, opening May 2.

Poland 1962. Anna (newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska) is a beautiful eighteen-year-old woman, preparing to become a nun at the convent where she has lived since orphaned as a child. She learns she has a living relative she must visit before taking her vows, her mother’s sister Wanda. Her aunt, she learns, is not only a former hard-line Communist state prosecutor notorious for sentencing priests and others to death, but also a Jew. Anna learns from her aunt that she too is Jewish – and that her real name is Ida. This revelation sets Anna, now Ida, on a journey to uncover her roots and confront the truth about her family. Together, the two women embark on a voyage of discovery of each other and their past. Ida has to choose between her birth identity and the religion that saved her from the massacres of the Nazi occupation of Poland. And Wanda must confront decisions she made during the War when she chose loyalty to the cause before family.

Trailer: The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life

Posted on March 5, 2014 at 8:00 am

One of the most touching moments of the Oscars was the award for a documentary short called “The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life.” It is the story of Alice Herz-Sommer, the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor, who died at age 110 just before her story was celebrated at the Oscars. She was born in Prague. Her parents’ friends included Kafka and Mahler. After the Nazis invaded, she was sent to Theresienstadt with her son. That camp was notoriously used to mislead Red Cross inspectors and others and she performed in over 100 concerts for visitors.

Her husband died in Dachau. After the war, she emigrated to Israel, and later lived in London. “I am Jewish,” she said, “but my religion is Beethoven.” A book about her life, A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World’s Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor, was published in 26 countries.

Malcolm Clarke and Nicholas Reed accepted their Oscar for the film on Sunday night and spoke movingly of their admiration and affection for Herz-Sommer. I hope this award helps make their film widely available.