Reviews

This film reminded me a bit of some of Toni Morrison's novels-about the shared heritage of American descendants of slaves, the grief and the magic. The film begins in a Black neighborhood that is if anything a more virtuous reflection of postwar middle-class white neighborhoods: neatly-kept bungalows with big yards, kids playing in the street (and with pigeons on the rooftop) and practicing musical instruments (a trumpet, in this case), a paterfamilias who keeps chickens and irons his own slacks, a mother who supplements her shopping with produce from her own garden and works as a midwife, two handsome sons with wives and a (quiet, respectful) child each.... The main problem is that the younger son's wife is bored silly by the agricultural table-talk at Sunday dinner: she sells real estate, and that is what land is to her. Also, the roof leaks, and the two sons can't get together to fix it.

Then Gideon remarks that he can't find his "toby" (thank you, subtitles, and also Wikipedia for mentioning this as a synonym of a mojo), a teapot with marbles in it falls to the floor and breaks, and Harry arrives. Harry is from that place in the South from which Gideon and Suzie emigrated when their sons were children. Harry is the drinking, gambling, womanizing friend who keeps his possessions in a few cardboard boxes instead of a bungalow. He draws to him a whole crowd of Gideon's fellow emigrés, mostly men, and with them comes fierce misogyny and the potential for violence.

Enough with the plot summary. This is a rich and entertaining film. I see that many of the other reviews are from this very month, so I guess it has just started streaming.

The last episode, which begins when the first plane hits (not a spoiler), brought me up against my own memories of 9/11. My son was in the city, and on that day I worried about him and listened to him on the phone. Aside from that, I was numb. It seemed utterly incomprehensible that this should have happened. Who? Why? How? Equally incomprehensible was the speed with which these questions were in fact answered, for reasons the Hulu series makes clear: the answers were already at the fingertips of various players who didn't know what to do with them (though the finale implies that various parties were prepared to exploit the bombing instantly). The series begins at the (or a) beginning, including the Kenyan embassy bombing, the USS Cole bombing, and interactions among the players on both sides. The questions have been answered, the lines drawn in such a way as to meet at this point, with the bombings. As I watched the last episode, I was able to feel for the people I love who were breathing that dust that day. I could finally weep for them, as well as for John O'Neill and Ali Soufan, whom I had not known about until now.

I was quite doubtful about this show. I have been enjoying the recent Sherlock Holmes movies and the British Sherlock TV show, while sometimes being a bit dismayed by the elaborate and over-the-top plotting, piling one adventure on another. Holmes and Watson have become brilliant themes on which wonderful actors can riff for our delight. Nothing boring here! What more is needed?

Well, the Holmes of Elementary, while he is eccentric, arrogant, disrespectful, etc., is also a good, kind person, and this was true of the original Holmes, who was capable of gentleness, charm, and anger at those who inflict suffering. He is selfish and self-centered--after all, since he is always right, you should be doing what he says--but he is also generous and cares about Watson and about crime victims. Jonny Lee Miller is developing a strong character who likes dealing with the kinds of odd urban crimes that are really Holmes's province.

It's true that Law and Order:CI presented a similar team, but that show isn't on any more. I am finding Elementary fresh and worth watching.

I went to check this out on IMDb after seeing Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) because I remember it as a really great performance by Gary Oldman. I had taped "Heading Home" from TV and watched it several times. Since it has few reviews and no plot summary, here goes.

As the other reviewers noted, the story is set in the early 50s, at a moment when England is still recovering from the war and there are all kinds of ferment in London: artists and poets have their own marginal culture, supporting each other's efforts to develop a new British aesthetic, while other, less educated men, like Oldman's Ian and the gangsters who lurk in the background of his life, are scrambling in the economic chaos to make their own pile of money.

Beautiful Janetta comes to London from the country and falls in love with a handsome poet, who displays her to his friends as his muse. Then she meets Ian, who is not handsome or educated but who is full of energy, hope, desire--and intelligence. Ian sees her personal charm as something to be put to work, and gives her a job and the possibility of making money.

The final scene, in which Janetta talks about the fragility of the truths she knows about that era, moved me at the time very deeply and still echoes in my memory. Richardson was great, and Oldman's Ian was one of the most alive characters I have ever seen on the screen.

This is not a great movie, I admit. Certainly the acting is bizarre (though often moving) and the rhythm takes getting used to. But I thought I would put in a good word based on a recent viewing experience. I am not rating it high but I really enjoyed it a lot.

6 or 7 years ago I went on a Conrad Veidt spree and bought copies of some his silents from an ebay seller/devotee. The quality varied and I recall that he particularly apologized for this item, which was barely viewable. All you could really see was Veidt's face... The other night TCM showed the Kino restoration and I sat down to see the film "for real." It was a pleasure to be able to take in the wonderful decors and costumes, and to get a relatively coherent version of the plot. The train wreck scene is stirring. And Veidt's face, again, as he progresses from sensitive soul to tormented monstrosity... In short, it was very rewarding.

Well, actually, in the Little Carpathians, apparently, which are not part of Transylvania, or so Wikipedia tells me.

I really enjoyed this film (at home on pay-per-view)though I think it is intended for a pretty narrow audience. As others have noted, the dialogue is amazingly stilted (very literary, rather like a French novel of the 17th or 18th century) and delivered in near-monotone. I kept feeling that the whole movie had been dubbed into English. On the other hand, I found the acting very fine, and I admired the insistence on presenting these characters as not at all like you, me, or the folks in the latest TV drama. The Countess in particular is a strange, unique portrait--her piety, her desire for amorous adventure, her pride, her intelligence. And that's before you get to the blood-of-virgins part.

The film proposes that what we are seeing before our eyes is not the truth about the Countess. We are watching a fantasy of a noblewoman enacting a tale "told by the victors"--by the men who were enriched by her downfall and relieved, too, to be rid of the very possibility of an intelligent woman. The tale is told, too, by the peasants and others whose sons are fighting in her army. Yet the man who questions the gory story is her lover, and he too may be deceived. There is no simple answer to the question, what really happened?--no resolution.

In short, it's an intellectual (and visual) treat, but it won't affect your blood sugar.

This show is delightful! The episodes I've seen involve the two most outrageous Project Runway designers shopping in small towns for fabric to create dresses for women who normally are way too busy raising kids, pulling down a paycheck, or putting deer meat on the table to wear a dress. It becomes a chronicle of the various ways in which women "wear the pants"--literally--around the country, doing various jobs where a dress would get in the way.

It is indeed charming, and whoppingly sentimental (dad's eyes tear up as he sees his 30-year-old little girl all dolled up), but really delightful, too. It is a paean to "real people" and small communities, the kind where the only yardage in any store is quilting fabric. Austin and Santino are fish out of water and it is clear that they are learning a lot, too. They bring to it such warmth and zest--and humor and love of their work--that it is a pleasure to watch them.

I decided to write on this movie because, unlike most of those whose reviews I have read, I really enjoyed BOTH parts of the movie.

Yes, the Julia-and-Paul-in-Paris segments are over-the-top wonderful. They are superbly acted, funny, delightful, full of mouthwatering food and wonderful eccentric women in hats--and they present a romance of mythical proportions. Streep as Child is a double goddess, and Stanley Tucci stands tall as a man whose various disappointments in life fade beside his satisfaction in his wife.

But I thought the Julie-and-Eric-in-Queens sections made a good contrast. Instead of ebullient postwar Paris and beloved colleagues and "penpals," you get sad, litigious New Yorkers and the somewhat dismal options open to a smart, educated, idealistic young couple living hand to mouth on two jobs. At the beginning you get some classic Ephron satire, but pretty soon the story focuses on food and love. Julie's life turns out to include friends who appreciate both. The modern folk aren't so witty, so ironic as the Paris group, though. They deal in compromises and sincerity. Julie is resigned to seeing herself as a bitch, rather than a goddess, and Eric pleads not to be called a saint.

But Julie accomplishes in one year what Julia needs more than eight years to do: get a book contract. Everything is faster, cooler, sadder and yet less potentially tragic in Queens than in the Childs' kitchens. This contrast was what made the glorious Child sections work. Myth and grimy reality.

Amy Adams was perfect. She gave Julie a depth and believability--the depth of shallowness, maybe, but still a touching quality.

I got interested in Western views of Japan in the 19th century a few years ago, so I knew a bit about the milieu Branagh purports to have chosen for his adaptation of Shakespeare's "As you like it." Well, I can see why he went for it: like Elizabethan theater, Kabuki has men playing the roles of women; there is wrestling in the play, so you can have a sumo wrestler; there are notes hung from trees, and that is something the Japanese know how to do properly; and everybody can dance around in gorgeous kimono at the end. Full stop. There is no attempt at all to think about Westerners in Japan, about the Japanese vs. the Elizabethan concept of nature (Arden looked like California to me), and they didn't even bother to get the sumo referee properly dressed. I didn't see anything at all remotely suggesting Yokohama (compare the wonderful scenes in Last Samurai). The colors were wrong. This Japan is as inauthentic as can be.

So what? It's a marvelously directed film which kept the plot chugging along in full sight, the wonderful speeches singing, and the dialogue hilarious. The actors were all golden, golden. It was just fun. My son got hooked by seeing Olivier's Henry V as a child, my daughter by Branagh's Much Ado about Nothing. I think I want to be sure a copy of this one is available for my grandson.

I am a middle-aged American woman who has never seen a soccer game and has never seen any kind of live sports game all the way through beyond Little League (3 brothers, 1 son). I live in a town where football is the main local religion. Nick Hornby's novel was a delight to read and really gave me some sense of the psychology as well as the anthropology of being a fan. I rented the movie because I wanted to SEE the novel: the stadium, the terraces, the colors, the craziness Hornby describes. Youtube and Wikipedia could tell me some about Alan Smith, Highbury, the Hillsborough tragedy, but not enough. The movie came through. Actual footage of games and scenes inside the stadium gave a powerful sense of what it's all about. The final sequence, in which various characters Paul's fandom has touched watch a championship game, was wonderfully moving. The plot has three characters--Paul the young fan, Paul the adult fan, and Sarah the outsider who is repelled by the irrationality, the loud and sweary masculinity of it all. The plot exists to allow Paul to expose, stubbornly as a child and articulately as an adult, what it means to be a fan. Sarah is there to force him into talking and thinking a bit about it. Both Pauls are marvelous. Colin Firth is amazing. His physical attractiveness is essential to the plot--it gets him into Sarah's bed so they can start talking about Arsenal-- and that simple fact leaves him huge amounts of room to be boyish, goofy, moody, clueless, innocent, and cruel.

This film was just good fun, not-quite-two hours of entertaining suspension of disbelief--literally, since if one does not believe in God, or believes anything in particular about him, one has to forget that. Which is easy, because every little idea and character is worked out just enough to keep the viewer engaged: yes, the Hebrew typewriter (on which God is typing his screenplay--he is woefully underendowed with electronics and evidently doesn't even have cable, though there is a satellite in his neighborhood) goes to the right when God hits "return"; yes, God is a baby-ditchdigger-pigeon-garbage man; yes, some kind of wings will appear in the proximity of the angel René until he gets his "real" ones. The Burning Bush becomes a hot-dog roast, a woman who reads the newspaper tells God off for allowing the news to happen, the devil has his own rewrite department. There is some kind of dumb or clever joke, visual or verbal or both, every minute. Maybe every thirty seconds.

The movie God makes provokes the one long sequence with relatively few jokes: people watching a movie. It reminded me quite a bit--and was surely meant to--of the movie scene in Sullivan's Travels, with men at the lowest ebb of dignity laughing at Mickey Mouse. But this audience is not a chain gang; it is all the people of Paris, cushioned by a social safety net (at one point René says that if he gets fired as an angel he'll have to apply for unemployment; hospitals are evidently good places to die or go crazy; you need a permit to make a movie; the police always seem to be in place whether needed or not; the more dangerous bits of the Eiffel Tower are roped off). Perhaps if there is a message it is that a society is better at providing safety nets than God, but that he survives because our imaginations need him (or, in the movie, vice versa).

I was impressed by this show, of which I've seen two episodes. The theme seems to be that the pace of life and of crime today is so fast that one can no longer seek truth or justice--one must just keep doing what one is doing and perhaps try to be kind to those who can't keep up.

The classic crime show follows the track laid down by Sherlock Holmes and beloved of all mystery readers: the Good Guys are the recurring characters, and they are completely dedicated to Justice, and in each episode/story they track down Bad Guys who have violated the law or morality in some way and try to see that the legal system punishes the Bad Guys for what they have done. Maybe sometimes it turns out that there is no crime actually committed--no Bad Guy this time; maybe sometimes the Bad Guy turns out to be sympathetic and virtuous; sometimes legal system is unable to follow through. But all these conflicts are registered for us through the wisdom of the Good Guys, who represent the desire for Truth and Justice.

In Conviction, the protagonists are not in fact particularly Good Guys. The head of the group of DAs, Cabot, will bend truth, justice, and/or the law to obtain a desirable conviction, and clearly gets a personal thrill not out of Truth or Justice but out of Winning. In another show, she would be shown up as stupid or incompetent, but here she is the smartest and most competent person around. The assistant DAs who make up most of the cast could be divided between those who will bend the law to protect themselves and those who are naively committed to some version of Justice--except that the law-benders have consciences and the committed ones find themselves compromising, and compromised too. Winning a case can be worse than losing one, even if Justice is served for a few minutes in the courtroom. What's more, in some cases even we the audience don't get to know the truth about a case--all we get to know is what the DA knows, and that may not be conclusive.

It is really impressive to have such a large cast, each member with a case, all moving around, bumping into each other, often lying to each other, in one episode. The plot is just a pattern glimpsed in chaos. There is no illusion that when one case ends, the DAs can sit down and congratulate each other; more crime is out there, other cases are bubbling up as the criminals and victims of the preceding one sink into the background. I feel that this could be a very truthful and moral show, precisely because it does not comfort one with the triumph of Truth and Virtue.

I watched a version of this about 2 hours long, with French intertitles. It kind of staggered visually but had a nice score that underlined the dramatic moments of the plot. At least a bit was missing, since it is announced as a drama in prologue and 5 acts, and the 5th act intertitle was missing.

The story is based on the Schiller play/Verdi opera Don Carlos, and it is abundantly operatic, with romantic passion and politics intertwining. The main character is King Philip of Spain, the one who married Mary Tudor Queen of England and wanted to marry her sister Elizabeth I. In fact, his second or third wife was it seems a French princess, Elisabeth de Valois, who had at one time been intended for his son Carlos. Carlos himself died young after being imprisoned, and this "triangle" became the nucleus for a plot about romantic and political generational strife.

I suspect that it would help one to follow the plot and issues to have the story and characters well in mind (as I certainly did not). There are presuppositions about their roles that are not clear from the film itself, I think. The result was that I watched 2 hours of actors in Velazquez costumes emoting in wonderful vast sets viewed at many dramatic angles.

The actor playing Philip, Eugen Klöpfer, was excellent. He went from bold, cruel youth to broken age quite impressively. Since he loves his wife Elisabeth and wants her to love him, and loves his son although he doesn't trust him one bit either with political office or with his wife (rightly), and loves the Inquisition, his motivation in any given scene often seems to come out of nowhere. You never know whether he will threaten someone with death, beg him/her for love, or be too busy to notice them; yet he always seemed convincing. The result was, for me anyway, a character as histrionic and self-contradictory as a real king might be.

The actress playing Elisabeth had to look good in the elaborate costumes, look unhappy, and swoon a lot. She did her part but lacked charm. It was not clear why anyone would fall madly and irrevocably in love with her.

Conrad Veidt as Don Carlos was a puzzle to me. I find in Wikipedia that it is assumed the historical Carlos was mad, and Veidt's performance would bear that out. He literally seems to be half a man--his buddy the Marquis Posa (William Dieterle) is a solid man of action and thought who keeps proposing that Carlos liberate somebody--Flanders, or the Spanish people, who love Carlos. The person from whom they need liberation is, of course, Philip and his Inquisition or domination. But every time Posa suggests that Carlos start a revolution Carlos replies, "But--I love Elisabeth!" The only variation is when Philip shoots Posa and Carlos draws a sword on his father--but then drops it, stunned by the realization that Posa loved him enough to die for him. He can't act, because again, love gets in the way. The force of love seems to twist and bend Carlos's frail body, making him incapable of action, magnetized by the objects of his love and oblivious to politics or honor.

At the last, Carlos is awaiting the Inquisitors, having been told that if he begs for mercy he will get it. It is not clear what his heresy is, but certainly it has something to do with coveting his father's wife. Unfortunately Elisabeth comes to visit him in his cell and they are glued together in an embrace when the Inquisitors arrive. Although the Grand Inquisitor has the document of clemency, Carlos forgets to ask for it.

Conrad Veidt is always the most interesting thing on screen in the film, yet his character is never one who can be understood or sympathized with. His makeup is somewhat grotesque (very white with very dark mouth, compared to the other men) and when he is on the scene (he also plays Charles V, Philip's father, in the prologue) his body pretty much defines the space in front of the camera--reaching arms, falls to the ground, creeping along hedges in the park or walls in the dungeon. I noticed several scenes in which everyone else is just standing in a row and he is moving in front of them. The result is that Carlos seems rather like a Cesare who has been mesmerized, not by a killer, but by Elisabeth. He has one long moment (when his father asks him if he loves E. and he leans his head back and slowly closes his eyes) that is downright Garboesque. His last scene, in which he caresses the block lightly before laying his neck on it to have his head chopped off, is marvelous too.

But rarely, in watching a film, have I been so aware that it is just shadows, images flickering and fooling one into thinking there is life there.

Another reviewer, in 2002, commented on this film: "The film unfortunately ends rather abruptly and arbitrarily. Matathias has only got as far as the Middle Ages when the curse is suddenly lifted and he is permitted to die. No compelling reason is given for why this particular time and place should be the end of the Wandering Jew's journey." In fact, the Middle Ages segment is the second one; it is followed by the Renaissance segment and finally the Spanish Inquisition, in which the Jew is burned as a heretic. I think the answer to the decision to end the Jew's life in this period has to do with the period when the film was made, the early 30s, when the Nazis were once again asking "Are you a Jew?" and condemning people based on the answer.

(I should add that the same director made a silent film of The Wandering Jew, 10 years earlier, and there is a note on IMDb that his star was famous in the role in theatrical productions. So the story and probably its blazing finale were established in a stage version much earlier.)

The original story would be that the Jew is to wait "until Christ comes again," i.e. the Second Coming, the Last Judgement. The film script modifies this to "until I come to you again," and the plot shows us the slow progress of Mathatias from a man who would rather see his beloved dead than alive with her husband, to an understanding of the Christian hope in life after death and a less selfish love (in the Italian story, where he decides not to kill his wife as a gesture of possession when she wants to become a nun), to an actual Christ-like role in the Seville sequence, where a whore defines her relationship with him as that of Mary Magdalene to Christ (thank heavens the DaVinci Code theory had not been cooked up at the time). So Christ "comes to him again" as he is being burned as a heretic.

Interestingly, his heresy consists of (1) blasphemy, in saying that Christ might be hard put to recognize his own, i.e. the inquisitors themselves, since they are not Christlike, and (2) refusing to deny his Jewishness. Christ, of course, was himself brought before the High Priests on a charge of blasphemy. The film sort of finesses the problem of baptism (in the version I saw, there was no evidence of the Italian son's being baptized, but the friar says that he has gone to Heaven when he dies), which is what the Inquisitors are in principle asking Mathatias to undertake.

However, the decision is presented to him not as being baptized in Christ but rather as denying his Jewishness, ceasing to be a Jew, and in the early 30s the ringing declaration--by a Christ figure--"I am a Jew!" must have been pretty strong stuff.

The end of another British film starring Veidt, Jew Suss, is similar; Suss in fact has a choice to declare himself not Jewish, since in fact his father was a local aristocrat, but he opts to die a Jew, representing the people he grew up with. Both Suss and Mathatias are heavy-duty sinners (lust, avarice, and pride to say the least) and their Jewishness is not "normalized"--parts of the Wandering Jew look like an excellent production of Merchant of Venice--but they redeem their sins by their concern for the poor, the outcast, and, in Jew Suss's case, specifically Jews in a pogrom situation.

Since Veidt in fact insisted on declaring he was a Jew on official German forms in the early 30s, although he wasn't (his wife was), his choice of two roles of Jewish martyrs was a pretty obvious political move. (Later in Hollywood he starred as a Nazi general in Escape, whose plot turns on the internment in a prison camp of a famous American Jewish actress who was born in Germany.) I think there was a lot of denial in the UK and America about the situation of the Jews under the Nazis, and Veidt seems to have done what he could to make it clearer that antisemitism should disgust decent people and especially Christians.

It is hard to vote for this film, because it is really just the shreds of a film. The odd thing is that ONLY the parts of the story relevant to gay sensibilities remain: the relationship between the violinist Paul Körner (Veidt) and his youthful protegé, the scenes of all-male partying, Paul making a pass at the man who turns out to be a blackmailer, and apparently the slide-show lecture on the sexual continuum (though perhaps this was reconstructed from the historical sexologist's actual slide shows?). Besides this, there is the skeleton of the legal plot: Paul reading about suicides and knowing what's behind it, the judge giving the blackmailer 3 years and Paul one week, and Paul coming home to kill himself.

What you don't see is any scene at all with a woman in it, except for one where young Paul runs in terror from a whorehouse. Evidently there were two sets of parents and a young woman all active in the original film, and they all ended up being cut from the final film.

There is not much development of the character of the boy Paul loves--it is not quite clear from the end whether he mourns Paul as a self-sacrificing friend, a great violinist, or the love of his life. Paul himself, in an extended flashback, evidently realized he was gay at the moment a whore kissed him; the fill-in titles explain that a young woman of dubious morals kissed the boy at a point after his story has disappeared from the surviving clips of the film. So presumably the boy has realized that, since he does not like being kissed by a woman, he must be gay and love Paul after all. It's an odd logic, redeemed only by Veidt's combination of sensuality and morality (great moment when he starts eagerly kissing a pick-up and then is horrified when the man asks for money).

Veidt is pretty amazing. The man played vampires or at least exotic sexual predators, Jews, Nazis in Allied films, a Devil's Island inmate--every kind of marginal monster; in one movie he seems to be playing Jesus. When he played kings, he played them mad and/or deformed. Yet he gave every character an edge, a dignity, a strength that made you feel it wasn't right if he got shot in the back. In this film, he looks rather like Cesare from Cabinet of Dr. Caligari but the same skeletal-elegant physique and haunted quality (and haunted makeup) become expressions of human sorrow, longing, and a frail nobility of character.

It is interesting to compare this film to Victim, made 42 years later. In both stories, the protagonist is a man who discovered and explored his sexual feelings for other men as a schoolboy; as a mature adult, having achieved a position of great prestige, he becomes involved in an unconsummated relationship with a much younger man who admires him passionately. In both stories, a law makes homosexuals an easy target of blackmailers, and both men attempt to defy the blackmailers and the law. In the 1919 movie, however, Körner, after attempting to redirect his sexual desires by various means, accepts himself as the way he is and lives a gay lifestyle (or so we may assume from his activities at the drag ball). When he is confronted with the prospect of marriage, he sends his parents or prospective girlfriend to a sexologist so that they, too, can accept him as he is. If he does not try to seduce his protegé, it is presumably from a sense that it would be wrong to exploit his position of power over a very young, indeed virginal, student (and the boy is horrified when he realizes that the relationship is potentially sexual). Melvin Farr, on the other hand, has succeeded in redirecting his sexual desires: he is married to a cool blonde and together they are confident that he is, if not completely heterosexual, completely monogamous. No gay bars for him. The boy with whom he is in love, on the other hand, is frankly gay and would like to seduce his hero. In both stories, the tragic "victim" is the man who, openly and unreservedly gay, is vulnerable to blackmail, tries to protect the man he loves, and finally kills himself. The earlier movie has a distinguished doctor arguing that there is a sexual continuum which is natural and good, and should not be subject to legal penalties or blackmail; the later movie just has examples of presumably good (eminent) men who happen to have secret homosexual sides, and the hero's nobility lies in going to bat for a working-class boy who could not keep his own sexuality secret.

I am struck by the fact that both the tragic victims look physically frail--thin, as if worn to a bone in the hope that if they turn sideways they will be overlooked by society. Both the ambiguously sexual survivors are heartier types, physically more solid and substantial, though of course Dirk Bogarde could out-edge even Veidt.

I watched this movie (a bad copy, with almost inaudible sound) absolutely spellbound, because of Conrad Veidt's performance. It is also fascinating because it was made as a voice against German antisemitism (one of the first bits of dialogue in the film is along the lines of "But it's 1730! anti-Jewish sentiment is a thing of the past!" "No, my friend, they will be against us in 1830, and in 1930, too"). However, there was a lot of trouble getting it to open in NYC because in America it was perceived as antisemitic. (I got this from John Soister's book on Veidt). It was hard to get a Jewish character on film in the 1930s who was both recognizably "Jewish" and not a stereotype. In 1940 the Germans made a film of the same book which made Veidt's elegant Jewish martyr into an elegant Jewish monster.

The plot is not new. It's similar to Musset's Lorenzaccio or Victor Hugo's Le Roi S'Amuse (Verdi's Rigoletto), I think: a sexually rapacious prince is served by a man he despises, up to the moment when the prince's lust and cruelty make the "best friend" into a mortal enemy. Frank Vosper is interesting as the prince in this movie, a man who at the beginning has a few noble impulses but who quickly degenerates into drunken cruelty and lecherousness. Benita Hume is also pretty cool as his decadent wife, who encourages his liaisons.

Veidt's role, Joseph Suess Oppenheimer, is however completely absorbing. His character is also a sensualist. He kisses everybody on the face or mouth--rabbis, his mother, his daughter--except for the woman he falls in love with. He loves luxury and enjoys beautiful clothes and presiding over a ball, and finding a new female tidbit for his prince to deflower. He seems to fantasize about knocking down the walls around the ghetto where he grew up, but his power is in fact a bit shaky; his service to the Jews seems to consist mostly in not denying he is Jewish. When he finally puts himself on the line to save an innocent Jew, it turns out to be a bad move--the prince wants vengeance on him for this concession. As Veidt's character confronts these disappointments, we see the man emerging from the courtier, and it's a wonderful transformation.

There is an odd plot twist, in which Oppenheimer learns that his biological father was a Gentile. Supposedly this makes him not Jewish. However, since Jewishness is reckoned by the mother, this makes no sense. Either his mother is a Gentile (not clear from the film) and the Jews would not consider him truly Jewish even if his father was the virtuous Jew Oppenheimer, or else she is a Jewess and our hero is thereby Jewish no matter who fathered him. The idea that he chooses to be a Jew feeds into the final scenes, and is relevant to Veidt's own life (apparently, though he was not Jewish at all, he insisted on stating that he was Jewish to the German authorities).

Although the plot is messy and a wee bit incoherent, the performances are beautiful and this is worth a look.