By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, March 18th, 2013 - Comments Off

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Wilmington on DVDs: Ministry of Fear; It’s In the Bag!;Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness

MINISTRY OF FEAR (Three Stars)

U.S.: Fritz Lang, 1944 (Criterion Collection)

Graham Greene called them “entertainments.” That was the slightly ironic moniker he gave to those of his novels in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s (usually spy or crime thrillers) that were written with a more populist eye and intended less seriously than the more realistic and ambitious novels, like “The Heart of the Matter” or “The Power and the Glory,” where he struggled with question s of sexual temptation and Catholic Guilt.

That doesn’t mean Greene‘s entertainments (like “This Gun for Hire,” “Stamboul Train,” and “Our Man in Havana“) were Hithcockian larks, or that the movies almost inevitably made from them were trivial. Consider the strange psychological-political 1944 picture made from Greene‘s “Ministry of Fear” — in which the “hero” is a Britisher, Stephen Neale, just being released from a sentence in a mental hospital for the murder of his wife. Neale is a convicted (mercy) killer who leaves the asylum and its ticking clock and almost immediately tumbles into intrigue and a Nazi spy ring at a charity fair, where he wins a mysterious cake, and soon is running, and chasing, for his life — in a London plagued by bombs, spies, murderous blind men, séances, and sinister people with accents.

Is Neale crazy? Or is the world? The movie was made at the height of World War II, it starred Ray Milland as Neale — with Marjorie Reynolds as the refugee committee love interest, Dan Duryea, Carl Esmond, and Hillary Brooke among villains or suspects, and Percy Waram and Erskine Sanford as not-too-swift detectives). And it was directed by a filmmaker you might have thought would be perfect for the job:: that German émigré master cineaste of psychological tension, weird criminal underworlds and political nightmares, Fritz Lang. Lang had just finished the strongly anti-Nazi 1943 resistance thriller Hangmen Also Die!, partly written by Bertolt Brecht, and he was anxious to contribute further to the war effort of his adopted country.

An unhappy happenstance then that Greene the original author thought Ministry of Fear (the book is called “The Ministry of Fear”) was one of the worst movies ever made from one of his novels. Lang must have agreed at least partly, because, when he met Greene, he apologized for the film. The culprit, in this case, may have been Ministry of Fear’s prolific screenwriter and associate producer, Seton I. Miller, a Harvard man whose ’30s-’40s movie credits include Scarface, The Adventures of Robin Hood and half a dozen or so of the best Warner Brothers movies of that era.. Miller’s Fear script though, strips the story of much of its psychology, robs it of some suspense, and goes somewhat too coy in the love scenes, including the film’s irritating last shot. If you watched this picture cold, without reading the credits, you might guess it to be a slightly clumsy imitation of Graham Greene and Fritz Lang — and Seton I. Miller.

Still, both these fathers were too harsh on their misfit child of war and espionage. Ministry of Fear, with its barren studio London streets, its gray skies and its air of brooding, barely contained menace, is not bad Greene or Lang — nor even bad Miller. It’s sub-par for all three gentlemen, but they all bring a lot to the table anyway, as does Milland. The movie, with its portrait of a world facing chaos, a hero escaping own dark instincts, and a city confronted with havoc, is — dare we say it? — entertaining.

Extras: Interview with Lang scholar Joe McElhaney; Trailer; Booklet with a Glenn Kenny essay.

IT’S IN THE BAG! (Three Stars)

U.S.: Richard Wallace, 1945 (Olive)

Fred Allen, the irreverent, baggy-eyed first citizen of Allen’s Alley, was one of the top radio comedians of the ’40s. But he’s somewhat forgotten these days, except by specialists, and the sometimes hilarious 1956 Allen-starring vehicle It’s in the Bag! illustrates the unfairness of that neglect.

Most great comics are delightful eccentrics. Fred Allen, somewhat like that other wisecracking Allen (Woody), tended to be a brainy outsider, making fun of everyone else. (Unlike Woody, he didn’t tend to make fun of himself too.) His wit was as dry as his voice, which often sounded like a toccata for corn husks, and he was perhaps the most consciously intellectual and sharp-witted of the top radio comedians. Fred Allen had no sacred cows — or even a sacred moose.

In It’s in the Bag!, Allen first appears before the movie begins, ridiculing the credits, disgustedly calling them a waste of time and insisting that half the people listed (including the director, Richard Wallace) are actually somebody’s relatives. The story that follows this rude outburst — in which Allen (a co-writer in those disrespected credits) plays Fred Floogle, proprietor of Floogle’s Flea Circus — is a satiric crime-thriller-comedy. And it’s based on the same Gogol tale which supplied Mel Brooks with The Twelve Chairs — except here there are only six chairs, one of which contains the fortune that Floogle was bequeathed by a murdered rich relative, and that his wily lawyers (including John Carradine), are trying to steal.

I won’t describe what happens next, except to say that it involves improvident expenditures, a nervous heir surrounded by cold-blooded killers, overcrowded theaters, star-crossed and addle-brained lovers, angry landlords, Floogle’s cracked family (Binnie Barnes, Gloria Pope and Dickie Tyler), Robert Benchley as his snobbish prospective in-law, Don Ameche, Rudy Vallee, Victor Moore and Allen as a hastily assembled barbershop quartet (the group has possibilities, except for the bass), Sidney Toler (“Charlie Chan”) as a suspicious detective (sans fortune cookie dialogue), William Bendix as a sensitive gangster surrounded by more murderers (he has possibilities too), and Jack Benny as, well, Jack Benny. When Benny and Allen get together for their inevitable insult-flinging match, reviving the most celebrated comic radio feud of all time, it’s the movie‘s untoppable high point.

By the way, since we’re complaining about the credits, I think it’s insensitive to produce a movie as a starring vehicle for a comedian like Fred Allen, whose signature physical trait was the bags under his eyes, and entitle it “Its in the Bag!“ Is nothing sacred? Would we entitle a Jimmy Durante vehicle “It’s in the Nose!?“ Or a Mae West vehicle…Well, you see my point. And yes, Steve Allen played a brainy outsider too. But Gracie Allen, no — and none of them were relatives of the producer. (Sometimes they weren’t even really Allens.)

Anyway, when people talk of “acquired tastes,” they’re talking of performers like Fred Allen (a.k.a. John Florence Sullivan). But he’s a taste well worth acquiring. Unless you don’t like performing fleas, or Jack Benny (a.k.a. Benjamin Kubelsky). Well….

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played a brainy outsider too. But Gracie Allen, no — and none of them were anybody’s relatives. (Sometimes they weren’t even really Allens.) Anyway, when people talk of “acquired tastes,” they’re talking of performers like Fred Allen (a.k.a. John Florence Sullivan). But he’s a taste well worth acquiring. Unless you don’t like performing fleas, or Jack Benny (a.k.a. Benjamin Kubelsky). Well….

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SHOLEM ALEICHEM: LAUGHING IN THE DARKNESS (Three and a Half Stars)

U.S.: Joseph Dorman, 2011 (Docurama)

Let me tell you about this fellow Sholem Aleichem, or Solomon Rabinowitz, or Rabinovich, or whatever his name is: the very famous Jewish writer of long ago whom this documentary fellow Joseph Dorman just made a movie about. Yes, I’ve seen it. It’s a very good movie. I promise you: you‘ll love it.

But I have to admit. It’s true, Sholem had problems. He couldn’t hang on to a nickel, and he threw all his money away once, lost it on the stock market, or, to be more truthful, lost the money his father-and-mother-in-law gave him. But we all throw away money, don’t we? Face it my friend: Who can hang onto some rubles or dollars in these times, except maybe the Rothschilds? Or whoever has their job now.Anyway, back to Sholem. He‘s a boy from the shtetl, Voronko, in Pereyaslav, near Kiev, in the old days, the old country. Reads and loves books from when he was a child; his mother taught him. Loved Daniel Defoe‘s “Robinson Crusoe” and wrote his own Jewish version of it when he was a boy. (What was it called? I don’t know. “Rubinstein Krusowitz” maybe, something like that. How would I now? I‘m some mind reader of the dead now?)But he had a way about him, Sholem. He married a rich girl in the rich mansion where he worked. He was the handsome well-spoken young tutor and her parents said “No,“ so he eloped with her, and they ended up having six children. And his in-laws gave them lots of money, and they lived well for a while and then he lost it, all. In the stock market, like I said. What does he know about money? Tell me the truth: What do you know? What do I know? What does the U.S. Congress know, even? Ay…But the man could write, let me tell you. He had that going for him, always ….No, I won’t say “Oy.” Say it yourself.

What’s important is: He works hard, he writes a story every week (or more) for 25 years, and people keep printing them and putting on his plays and reading his novels, and reading the books of his short stories, and God help us, they’re probably even on the Kindle now. He was, they tell us, the greatest Yiddish writer who ever lived, which of course maybe sounded, in the 19th century, like you would say now the tallest Romanian skyscraper.

I‘m not being a disrespectful smarty-pants. It’s just that there weren’t many Yiddish respectable writers, God knows, when Sholem started back in the late 1800s, and he was the one who insisted on writing in Yiddish, the common people‘s words, instead of Hebrew and Russian, the classier, more literary languages. He edited a Yiddish literary magazine, on top of everything else. (No wonder he lost money on the stock market.) Leo Tolstoy wrote for him, can you believe it? Three stories. No, not in Yiddish, you meshuggeneh. In Russian. Sholem translated it into Yiddish. But think of it: Tolstoy.

We all read his new story in the paper every Friday. A story a week, for 25 years, come rain, come shine. Maybe not always, but almost always. Imagine it! You’ve got to give the man credit. And all those characters he dreamed up and put words in their mouths: Tevye, the milkman in the shtetl. Menakhem Mendl the bad-luck stock market speculator. Motl the cantor’s son. Tevye‘s daughters. You know, they called him the Jewish Mark Twain? And you know what Mark Twain said? “Tell him I am the American Sholem Aleichem.“

Imagine: When he died in New York City, in 1916, there were 100,000 people in the streets for his funeral. Or maybe 200,000: Depends on where you read. (They say 200,000 in the movie press book.) So many people. From the East Side, West Side, from Brooklyn, from Canal Street, from Bleecker Street, From Greenwich Village, from everywhere. And when he came to New York years before, you know, he wrote two plays, they opened them on the same night, and the critics blasted both of them. Yes, the Jewish critics — maybe some of the same ones who were later in the streets for his funeral, taking their hats off when he passed. They’re mean, some of these critics. They like to tear people apart, tear artists apart, especially people with a big name. And who had a bigger literary name in the community, in our whole world, than Sholem Aleichem?After all, “Sholem Aleichem” is what you say a dozen times a day whenever you meet someone, whenever you say hello, whenever you say goodbye. You say it to everybody, and it means: “Peace be with you.”

But they all read him, you know. My father, my mother. My sisters, my brother. The Goldbergs, next door. The Bernsteins, the Singers, the Matuschanskavaskys up the street: their son Walter, you remember, the kid who gambled, and his four-eyed friends Billie and Izzy. The Einsteins. The Cohens, The Konisbergs, the Greenbergs, the Garfinkels, the Malamuds, the Spielbergs, the Roths. Even Mr. Monicelli, who brought the milk. Faithfully, every Friday, we read him and he made us all laugh, Jewish or not. And it’s not like he was some Little Mary Sunshine you know. He knew about all those bad things, or intimated them: the pogroms, the prejudice, the poverty. He was aware of them. And of what was to come? Thank God, he didn’t know about that. Or maybe he guessed. They say Kafka and Chekhov were two of his favorite writers. Kafka! Chekhov! A couple of comedians!

So much pain all around him, around us, even in what a lot of us thought was, compared to the shtetls back in Russia, paradise. Compared to the pogroms in Russia, the next stop to the promised land. America! How beautiful it could be, and how beautiful it seemed, by comparison. How bad and bigoted it sometimes got, for all the Jews on the black list. (Be thankful it wasn’t worse.) Yet, we all got together, America at the head, and we got rid of that murderer, Hitler, and his Nazi bums.

You know what Sholem Aleichem said about how to remember him at his funeral: “Let my name be recalled with laughter, or not at all.“ Think of it! Such a man. Such a mensch. God knows, Sholem had a sad enough life: his mother dead when he was only 13, family sickness, that money he lost, those mean New York critics, and then the family, wandering all over Europe on lecture tours to make just a little money to live on. And tuberculosis, sick in New York City, sick as a dog maybe, his last four years. But he wrote still. Made people laugh…still. Go figure. “If I were a Rothschild…” What a joke, huh?But you know why everybody knows him now? Of course you do. That play on Broadway, that big hit big-deal musical, so popular, what was it called? “Fiddling on a Hot Tin Roof?” No, well listen, it’s only a joke. You can’t kill a man for a joke. Yes, even for a bad joke, you can’t. Unless you’re a Nazi. “Fiddler on the Roof,” I know. Everybody knows, God knows. Book by Mr. Joseph Stein, my old college friend Danny’s father; music by Mr. Jerry Bock, with those klezmer style pop ballads, so pretty (“Tradition…!”); and lyrics by Mr. Sheldon Harnick with those words he sometimes gets, I swear, straight from the Tevye stories: “If I were a rich man deedle eedle eedle….All day long I’d bidi-bidi-bum, if I were a wealthy man.”

And, you know the funny thing is — funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha — he would have been a rich man, Sholem Aleichem, if he just could have lived fifty years more, when “Fiddler on the Roof” came out on the stage in 1964. Imagine it: If he could have just lived to 105-106 years old, the royalties from that one song alone eventually gets him, I don’t know, millions — although when Sholem wrote the original words for Tevye (not for Mr. Zero Mostel or Mr. Chaim Topol), it was what I said before: “If I were a Rothschild…” No matter. We get the meaning.

“Tradition!” Listen, what more can I say about him? The movie says it better. He made us laugh, he made us cry. He lived 57 years, he wrote always (when he could), and 100,000 (or so) people in New York City took off their hats when his coffin rode by. How many people show up for all the funerals of all those rich men we know or know about, except maybe to make sure the bastards are really dead? Sholem Aleichem: It wasn’t a perfect life, but it was a rich one. And nobody’s perfect — as two other writers, those Jewish boys Billie and Izzy, once said. They were right. Especially about comedy, they were right.

Yes, Yes. Don’t aggravate me now. I’ll read him again some day. When it comes out on the Kindle maybe. No, no, I’ll take him off the shelf tonight, I promise…Actually, I have read him recently, I lied. And my mother Rachel, God rest her soul, read him to me. You don’t have to tell me how great he was, how important. The movie said it too, Mr. Dorman said it, and very well. Meanwhile you gonif, you nebbish, stop giving me grief. Yes. Peace be with you.

As my friend, Mr. Rabinowitz, or is it Rabinovich, just told you (I was busy at a screening, watching some French movie) this documentary, Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, is a very good picture. Full of good talk, with experts like Michael Stanislawski of Columbia, Ruth Wisse of Harvard, Avram Nowersztern, the director of Sholem Aleichem House, Dan Roskies, the chair in literature at the Jewish Theological seminary, Aaron Lansky, founder/ director of the National Yiddish Book Center — and Sholem Aleichem’s granddaughter, writer Bel Kauffman, 100. (Well, maybe we could have done with a few less experts telling us how great he was, and a bit more Sholem Aleichem. But it‘s okay; that‘s what we have experts for.) The movie is full of great old pictures from the past, imaginatively edited and collaged, full of the feel and culture and literary treasures of Russian, Eastern European and New York City Jewish culture — though the movie makes it clear that Sholem Aleichem speaks to everybody, from Mark Twain on. By the way, Peter Reigert reads the voice of Tevye and Alan Rosenberg narrates.

Most of all. Dorman’s film is full to the brim with Sholem Aleichem, so much so that you may feel at the end you really know him, that you’ve always known him, just like you know your crazy drunk uncle who tells those wonderful stories at Passover and makes everybody laugh. Not that Sholem was crazy or drunk. But he knew how to make us laugh, and we did. He was an artist, a poet, a comedian. I guarantee you’ll have a better time at this little documentary about the world‘s greatest Yiddish writer, than if you go to (you should forgive the expression) A Good Old Fashioned Orgy or Knocked Up. Or those other big fancy-schmancy Hollywood movies. That’s a promise. Peace be with you. Or as we say: Sholem Aleichem.(In English and Yiddish, with English subtitles.)

Extras: “Making Of” documentray and featurette on Sholem Aleichem.

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