Carl Laemmle was truly one of the pioneers of the Hollywood movie industry. He founded and managed Universal Studios, which would be the biggest film producer in the United States. And he launched the careers of, among others, the director John Ford and the actress Mary Pickford. This German Jewish immigrant is profiled in James […]
Amid the dark clouds of the Holocaust, there was a remarkable silver lining. Not a single Jewish citizen of Bulgaria, an ally of Nazi Germany, was murdered. Indeed, all 49,000 Bulgarian Jews survived this unfathomable ordeal. Jacky and Lisa Comforty, whose ancestors hail from Bulgaria, explore this asterisk in the annals of the Holocaust. Their […]
Fifty seven years had elapsed since I watched Ship of Fools, and now I had the chance to revisit it thanks to the Turner Classic Movies channel. Would Stanley Kramer’s 2 hour-and-29-minute feature film be as absorbing, perceptive and impressive as it had been in 1965? Or would it be an outdated and kitschy relic best […]
Kantemir Balagov’s somber Russian-language movie, Closeness, set in the North Caucasus town of Nalchik, is a tense drama with a twist. Currently being screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation, it takes place in 1998, seven years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and focuses on a Jewish family suddenly facing a crisis. Avi […]
Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s minister of propaganda, recognized the importance of movies as the regime’s primary method of communicating with and winning over the masses of Germans. From the moment Adolf Hitler ascended to power, Goebbels calculatingly used the film industry to his and the Nazis’ advantage. During an eventful period of 12 years, he was the […]
Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer released a morale-boosting film during World War II that has since been recognized as a Hollywood classic. It was recently broadcast by the Turner Classic Movies channel. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, directed by Melvyn LeRoy, with a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, is based on a book written by Ted Lawson, a pilot who […]
Fred Zinnemann’s 1944 American drama, The Seventh Cross, is a rarity — one of the very few Hollywood movies about German concentration camps that was made during World War II. I saw it on the Turner Classic Movies channel. Adapted from a 1942 novel by the German refugee writer Anna Seghers, it was a commercial hit […]
Yuval Adler’s taut Middle Eastern thriller, Bethlehem, is a microcosm of Israel’s bitter and protracted conflict with the Palestinians. Now available for viewing on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, Adler’s debut feature film unfolds menacingly in the West Bank Palestinian town of Bethlehem and in nearby Jerusalem during the second Palestinian uprising, which raged from 2000 […]
Blending fact and fiction with exuberant abandon, Avida Livny’s “what-if” Israeli movie, Max Baer’s Last Right Hook, recreates an event that could well have happened. Currently being presented online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation, it stars the irrepressible Max Baer (1909-1959), who was the half-Jewish U.S. heavyweight boxing champion from 1934 to 1935. Bending […]
Journalism commands Hollywood’s undying interest and respect. Since the advent of the talkies in the late 1920s, the ink-stained wretches of the fourth estate have been featured in a procession of middling to tremendous movies ranging from The Front Page (1931) and His Girl Friday (1941) to All The President’s Men (1976) and The Paper (1994). […]