Five Jewish Films of the 1970s

Undeniably my favorite Jewish movie from childhood, The Frisco Kid begins in 1850s Poland (seventy years before Poland became a sovereign state—but why split hairs) with Gene Wilder as a newly minted rabbi on ice skates who is sent to the New World to run a fledgling congregation in San Francisco. As an innocent and a greenhorn, the young rabbi is stripped of his money, but not of his gumption-filled heart. Forging ahead, he finds himself teamed up with Harrison Ford, as the goyishe gunslinger who becomes his partner in this cross-country buddy film. I am a huge Gene Wilder fan. His summersault at the start of Willy Wonka is about my favorite movie moment around. So, mortifying as it is to admit, thirty-years later, I not only found this comedy to be comic, I thought it was moving too. Honestly. Gene Wilder’s face still kills me, it’s so sincere. And there is some classic Yiddish-accented dialog, like when Gene Wilder is trying to sneak up on a chicken and delivers this little sonnet:

            I don’t want to hurt you,
            I just want to eat you.
            I don’t want to hurt you,
            I just want to make you kosher.

I am a big connoisseur of 70s paranoid film and I tell you, Last Embrace has to be one of the strangest of the bunch. If Three Days of the Condor and Hopscotch had a baby and sent him to Hebrew School, he’d grow up to be Last Embrace. It centers around Roy Scheider as a secret agent sent out to pasture and suddenly embroiled in a revenge fantasy based loosely on ancient Jewish laws of retribution. The movie has plenty of Jewish content, including references to the dreaded and little known Zvi Migdal—a long defunct society of Jewish pimps who procured Jewish prostitutes, mostly for brothels in Buenos Aires back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The best I can guess is that the film’s continuity expert spent the whole time at craft services. During what is supposed to be an especially thrilling moment, Roy Scheider is looking through a giant tractate of Talmud as if it’s a phonebook. He finds what he’s after, yells “Bingo!” and shuts the book. Bingo! He’s been holding it upside down. There are two excellent cameos in this film. The first barely qualifies, but it’s still fun to spot a young Mandy Patinkin playing Stranger Half-Strangled on Train Platform. The second—and it’s the highlight of the movie—is made by Christopher Walken. Fresh off playing a wild-eyed soldier in The Deer Hunter, Walken kills as a buttoned-up bureaucrat sporting a monumental pair of eyeglasses who mans a desk in the spy organization’s secret lair.

Now I’d feel bad being harsh about Roy Scheider as a spy in Last Embrace, if I wasn’t going to tell you about his stellar performance as a spy—one of the finest—in Marathon Man. He plays his role magnificently (including the wonderfully choreographed Parisian fight scene in underpants). The movie stars Dustin Hoffman as Scheider’s grad student brother who gets caught up in post-Holocaust hidden-Nazi intrigue. Hoffman is pursued by Sir Laurence Olivier as the Weisse Engel (White Angel), an aged Nazi sadist trying to get at his stash of ill-gotten diamonds. It is one of the most thrilling of psychological thrillers. And I include it here as a film more Jewish in spirit than content. To get serious for a moment, what makes a Jewish movie Jewish? The Frisco Kid is chock full of Jewish content, and Last Embrace is built around Jewish ideas of retribution. But Marathon Man, a straight-up nail-biter about a Nazi coming after his diamonds (with no WWII flashbacks, and nary a Jewish reference between the opening scene and the height of the film) is a movie that ends up being more than most any other, a Jewish revenge fantasy. Even before the film’s climactic face-off, the build up to that clash—where the Weisse Engel is recognized by a female survivor as he walks along 47th Street in Manhattan—is to me, in some primal Jewish way, deeply, deeply affecting.

If I’ve given Roy Scheider a second chance, doesn’t Laurence Olivier deserve the same? Of course, his performance was devastatingly good in Marathon Man, but I can’t leave him in your heads as the evil White Angel. In The Boys From Brazil, Olivier isn’t the aged Nazi being hunted, but Nazi-hunter Ezra Lieberman, who ends up discovering a batch of baby Hitlers (94 of them to be exact) being grown to replace the original. And, speaking of babies, the movie starts with a baby Steve Gutenberg shadowing a Nazi war criminal in Paraguay. After an opening scene bubbling over with Third Reich symbolism, Gutenberg spots a meeting between his subject and a sinister-looking Farnbach, played by actor Günter Meisner (better known as Mr. Slugworth, from Willy Wonka), which never bodes well. Gutenberg’s sleuthing leads him right to the ringleader, one Gregory Peck, who plays Dr. Josef Mengele dressed, apparently, as author Tom Wolfe. It is Mengele’s plan that is being hatched – the breeding of a replacement army of Hitler clones using the Führer’s DNA. As ostensibly ridiculous as the premise is, it is executed amazingly well. Ezra Lieberman is faced with the perfect moral conundrum at the end. Having dedicated his life to seeing justice served for the ravages of the Holocaust, Lieberman must decide if he’s willing to be a party to the execution of the evil-yet-innocent for the unimaginable crimes the boys have yet to commit.

Of all the “Jewish” action films of the 1970s (popular genre that it is), Operation Thunderbolt might provide the most action. Personally, I can’t stand films that start with “inspired by actual events”—because, really, can a sentient being who shares our physical universe express an idea that is not in some way inspired by actual events? I’m pretty sure the answer is, No. What I do like is a plain old true story. And this movie is as true as they come. In 1976, an Air France flight from Tel-Aviv was hijacked and flown to the Entebbe airport in Uganda. The hijackers made demands. Ultimatums were given. Just hours before the hijackers were to begin executing their prisoners, a group of Israeli commandos landed at the airport under cover of darkness and rescued the hostages. The movie is a dramatization of these events and features some of the historical personalities involved appearing as themselves. (Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is played by assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.) As for charged moments in Israeli history that make for a good film and don’t immediately start hair-pulling political arguments between previously peaceable friends, this is a good one to grab on to. As far as I can tell, there’s no other side to take when it comes to the rescue of civilian hostages from a hijacked commercial jet. Still, if commando raids are too much for you, if you’re not one for Hitler-clones or blood feuds and even Harrison Ford with a six-shooter is too violent, there’s no need to worry.  Just skip the 70s and wait a couple of years. Yentl is on the way.