Different Slants

April 13th is not just another day.

Not for me, and not for America, either

Thomas Jeffereson was born on this day, in 1742, and he went on to write the Declaration of Independence.  I’ve read that there were approximately 4,000 Americans killed in that conflict, or about 1.3 soldiers a day died to win almost an entire continent from the British.

The first battle of the Civil War began on this day, at Fort Sumter in South Carolina (Rebs won, no casualties) just 68 years after the end of the the American Revolution.  There would be over 600,000 Americans killed in that savage conflict, or about 411 men died a day, in a cataclysmic attempt to see if we could keep most of our portion of that continent.

One hundred and eight-five years later, after the end of the Civil War in April 1865, I arrived in Chicago (four days late, around noon) on April 30th, 1950.  This is not a historically significant date which I’m sure would be universally agreed upon by all concerned.  But thirteen years later, I was a Bat Mizvah boy on April 13th, now 45 years ago, and that still matters to me.

Which, in my typically convoluted fashion, brings me to today’s movie, since at least one major member of that film’s cast had a bar mitzvah, too.  But thirty-five years before mine, when that ancient coming-of-age ceremony was far more obscure in America than it is now, and Jews kept a much lower national profile.

The Magnificant Seven! (1960), one of the most revered Western-themed movies ever made, even though it was based on an equally revered Eastern film, The Seven Samurai (1954).  I saw it when it came out (the US film) when I was just ten and I haven’t ever recovered from that first fantastic experience of an avalanche of charisma pouring off the screen by already famous and soon-to-be-famous macho American and European actors.

Yul Brynner (Chris, the so-cool leader), Steve McQueen (Vin, deadly, casual and philosophic) lead the cast.  Without them, the movie would be one more so-so Western.  But their spontaneous compatible relationship and world-weary attitude gave the film a spin that put a romantic sheen on everyone associated with it. 

Horst Bucholz (Chico), a new and very young German actor, played the 7th man to join the ranks of the immortal Seven.  Oddly, he was selected by the director, John Sturges, to play a brash young Mexican who distained the very peasant farmers he signed on to protect from the hordes of Mexican bandits who ravaged there village repeatedly, even though he was one of them.  His view of life was that the intinerant and frequently impoverished western gunslingers were  muy magnifico!! and he could never be a “miserable cowardly farmer” until Killer Cowboy Philosophy Class 101 cured him of that notion. 

Plus one very hot (and extremely disrespectful to her justifiably concerned father) chick with a single long black braid and a “Do it to me NOW, baby!” attitude, who convinced him that grinding corn on your knees, under blazing sunshine, can be very sexy indeed.

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This unlikely story of pre-adolescent solidarity is about one hour, during one day, on one street, in which an astonishing assault was mounted to stop one sadistic adult from tormenting one child. 

When you read my story, a harsh story, think about what you would have done, if I had come to your door that summer day, almost fifty years ago, to ask you to leave your home to come help me. 

It may be harder than you imagine to answer my question, once you find out what really happened, in the end.

But first, some historical background:

In 1960, I lived on the South Side of Chicago, near 87th and Stony and I went to the Charles P. Caldwell Grammar School, where at ten I was in the fifth grade.

My neighborhood was solidly Jewish and Irish.  Growing up at that time, it was as common for me to hear Yiddish accented English from Warsaw, and Gaelic accented English from Cork, as it is to hear to hear Spanish accents today from Mexico, Costa Rica and Honduras on the streets and stores of Chicago.

The Irish arrived here first in very large numbers, more than a million after the 1848 Potato Famine devastated the lives of the poor in British (Protestant)-controlled Catholic Ireland. Many died of starvation and disease and many more fled to America for a new start.

Then came the great 1880-1914 wave of Jewish immigrants, my ancestors, fleeing the poor and terror ridden shtetles of Eastern Europe, an area then known as the Pale where Jews from various bordering countries were forced to live in a narrow geographic corridor and who were periodically attacked and killed by rampaging Cossacks with the blessing of the Czarist government. Over two million came past Miss Liberty, on ships.

The Jews and the Irish had much in common. Both lived in terror of a merciless enemy too powerful to defeat and both saw America as the promised land, where all that mattered was how hard you worked and not where you were from and what God you believed in. At least, that was the dream.

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Miss Pettigrew Lives for a day (2008).  This movie is still playing, evidently an art house hit, meaning about 5,000 people have gone to see it in the few cities where it’s currently lighting up the screens.  And that’s a pity.

Lots of film reviewers have expressed their opinions about the virtues of this film, so why bother adding my obscure voice to theirs?  Well, I loved it, but not at first.  I responded to different aspects of the movie, and then to the wonderful cast.  It is truly a “Hollywood Movie” except they don’t make delicious kitsch like this anymore.

What struck me was the marvelous attention to detail that the set decorator, or art director, or whoever paid for everything devoted to this movie, to create a fantasy type of hyper-reality in (just barely) pre-war London.  

From the nightclub scenes to the lamps decorating an entranceway of an upper class house, to the great clothes everyone wore, this movie is a triple-scoop banana split for the eyes.  With syrup dripping everywhere.  Nothing in real life ever looked this good.

I went to art school for five years and am the son of an interior decorator who dragged me through the Chicago Merchandise Mart from the age of five to fourteen.  I must have absorbed something from the million hours I was involuntarily exposed to a myriad of color charts displaying thirty paint chips of very slightly different shades of red, or blue, or even blacks and whites. 

Color matters.  It affects mood and attitude.  People who appreciate the vast variations in colors are able to enjoy a significantly different, more vivid world than most people do.

In this so interesting recreation of another time and place that never really was, both the good guys and the bad guys are handsome, and perfectly integrated into their surroundings, like essential pieces of a mosaic. 

To me, a few of the players were like cartoons come to life, instead of flesh and blood actors, and that’s a compliment.  One in particular, in a supporting role is Shirley Henderson.  She is the cheating and especially petty and nasty grasping girlfriend of one of the romantic leads in the movie, the wealthy lingerie designer, Ciaran Hinds. 

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Happy Purim!!

In honor of that wonderfully conveluted  Babylonian Soap Opera, involving Queen Esther or rather, Hadassah, before she Babylonized her name; Mordicai, Esther’s good and watchful uncle, who uncovered and loyally reported the dastardly plot to kill the King to the governing authorities; Haman, the hated, conniving and vain prime minister to the Persian King Ahkashveyrosh (Jewish version) or King Nebuchadnezzar II (their version)  or King Xerxes I (another version) who was the capricious, resolute (and plagued with insomnia) Ruler of all he surveyed. 

Fortunately for present day Jews, the King thought shapely Esther was the hottest chick of all the many women from the King’s Empire, who paraded before him to audition for the position of the Queen.  I imagine the most  common position of the auditioning women was: Missionary. 

It’s good to be the King.

In any event, I decided to celebrate by spreading the very good word about the new Israeli-made movie, Bikur Ha-Tizmoret or The Band’s Visit (2007).  However, even though all of its dialogue is spoken in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic and English and the movie is entirely filmed in Israel in what appeared to me to be the dry and desolate Negev in Southern Israel, the film was nevertheless rejected by the geniuses at the Academy of Arts and Sciences as an acceptable candidate for an Oscar for the best Foreign Film Award because they decided it wasn’t “foreign” enough!

This movie, by the way, was made possible by Cyrus the Great, the Persian King who released the Israelites from their 47 year exile in Babylonia in 539 B.C., after the great Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 586 B.C. by his Dad (above) and the surviving Jews were taken as captives.  

Without his kindness and generosity, The Band’s Visit movie wouldn’t have been made and for certain, I wouldn’t be reviewing it.

The movie’s simple story is about an Egyptian Police Ceremonial Band being invited to celebrate the opening of an Arab cultural center in a small town in Israel, and becoming lost along the way in the wrong desert town for a period of one day, before friendly Israelis who befriended them send them on their way to the correct town.  That’s the whole premise.

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First, Happy Birthday to my partner in this blog and friend for 47 years (although at 58,  he still remains older than I am) Rick Munden!!

Back to fantasy…

Let’s say you want to dream up a movie that features, say…. the Amish; Wild Indians led by an Italian chief; a sexy postcard depicting a photograph of a less than virginal-appearing Jewish girl; robbing, thieving, drunken, murderous Anglo-Saxons (yes, difficult though it may be to believe, but the movie’s actually fiction!); a cuddling, affectionate cowboy in a bone-chilling and deadly Western blizzard and a remorseful bank robber attempting to learn Yiddish from a previously seen ice-skating Polish Rabbi.  

Then, add scenes featuring a wise-cracking chief Rabbi in an Eastern European Yeshiva with a shaky view of democracy or perhaps just Chicago-type voting mathematics and brutal bar fight in a whorehouse between the earlier imagined (and depicted) nebbishy Rabbi and a beer-barrel threatening assassin.  

Throw in a rough-hewn guardian angel-type Western figure who is determined, come-hell-or-high-water determined, to find himself a whore with “really big tits” (that’s an actual quote and not wishful thinking from this saintly reviewer) who repeatedly saves the trouble-prone young Rabbi’s life while escorting him from the Midwest to a newly built San Francisco synagogue by any means possible; a Rabbi, post-nebbishness, who deftly and courageously steps into the middle of a high noon Western style showdown in the middle of the street between two deadly gunman that hate each other in order to prove that:

        “I’m not a Rabbi for nothing, you know…”

My only question would be:

        Who the hell would you market it to?  The Amish?  Italian Indians?  Bars with brothels?

Well, whoever thought up this lovingly cliche-ridden, culture clashing movie that displays every emotion from two points of view, impressive cleavage (no pun there) and friendship so real it spills off the screen?  

Who decided people wanted to see serious religious devotion, even unto death to save a sacred, flameable, irreplaceable Torah; skilled peyote-using Native Americans who decide getting a true-believing Rabbi high is hysterical; and slyly trying to pass off the world famous actor from Star Wars and Indiana Jones as a sure-enough cowboy Goy when in reality, Harrison Ford has a whole lot more in common with the superb Gene Wilder (on or off the screen) than any average movie-loving person would believe…is such a genius!

           Oy Veyismere!! Such a Genius!! Gott im Himmel!!! 

I highly recommend that anyone: cowboy, Amish or Star Wars addict rent this wonderfully written, charmingly depicted and most likely forgotten movie of many admirable qualities.

Oh, yes!  The name of the movie is: The Frisco Kid (1979)

By the way, if you should know a nice, single, Jewish boy, that actress Penny Peyser is one hot catch!  Just a thought………….

See you, under the Sabbath Lights…

Robert M. Katzman 

This brief moment in my life lingers on in my memory, because it reminds me that a little compassion can make all the difference–when the world is crashing down on a guy.

I know that is so, because at different times in my life, I was that guy.   Because when your luck turns, or everything you’ve tried to do goes south, suddenly, no one has any time to bother with you, as if bad luck rubs off, or something like that.

What follows is true, and this is exactly how it happened:

On a merciless July scorcher of a day, in 1969, so hot that the very air shimmered, I was working the lunch shift in my kosher delicatessen in Hyde Park, which is part of Chicago, on the South Side of the city.

I was looking out of my big glass windows, over the round pale green paper sign that advertised:

                                 Lunch Special!!  

          Hot Dog–Chips–And a Cold Coke!!

                             $2.50!!!

when I saw this young black kid get forcefully tossed out of the drugstore next to me, where he lost his balance and fell to the ground, scraping both hands on the hot concrete walkway.  And there he sat, looking morose, rubbing his sore hands together, and occasionally, wiping tears off his face.  People walked around him.  No one stopped.   

He was this neighborhood punk, then about sixteen, whom I’d known about for years.  When I was running my corner newsstand, he’d run up and try to swipe a comic book off the display rack and then run away.  Sometimes I would catch him, and sometimes he was too fast for me, and then he’d run off laughing.

I was only a few years older than he was, still a teenager, and pretty fast myself, except he knew I couldn’t leave my newsstand so, that gave him an advantage to exploit, which…he did.  He was a little, local, pain in the ass, and not just to me.

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