MOVIES

Hollywood
Confronts
The Holocaust

Director Paul Mazursky directs Ron Silver in Enemies, A Love Story. The
film is based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel about four Holocaust
survivors in New York — a man and the three women he marries.

TOM TUGEND

Special to The Jewish News

S

Paul Mazursky directs Margaret Sophie Stein, left, Ron Silver and Anjelica
Huston in a confrontational scene in Enemies, A Love Story.

Just in time for the Academy
Award nominations, three
blockbuster movies that
grapple with the issues and
the human drama of the
century's watershed event
are being released almost
simultaneously.

40

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1990

cenes from three major
Hollywood motion pic-
tures: A Jewish boxing
champ fights for his survival
at Auschwitz.
A Chicago lawyer defends
her father, accused of wartime
atrocities against Hungarian
Jews.
Four Holocaust survivors
weave their love-hate relation-
ships in the New York of the
late 1940s.
The first scene is from
Triumph of the Spirit, the sec-
ond from Music Box, and the
third from Enemies, A Love
Story.
All three movies were
released the middle of Decem-
ber in Los Angeles, New York
and Toronto, in time to qual-
ify for the Academy Awards
nominations, and they all
deal, directly or. indirectly,
with the Holocaust. (A fourth)
film, the Jewish Heritage
Society's Lodz Ghetto,
opened a week earlier.)
Have we renewed proof here
that stories of the Holocaust
retain their grip on movie and
television viewers, alongside
lighter holiday fare? Are Jew-
ish producers and directors
merely foisting their own eth-
nic hangups on the general
public? Or is the simultane-
ous release of the three pic-
tures mere coincidence?
Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of
the Simon Wiesenthal Center
and himself adept at harness-
ing the visual media to per-
petuate the memory of the
Holocaust, thinks the mes-
sage is as timely as ever.
"What's been happening in
Eastern Europe and China

spurs people's interest in how
to deal with brutality," Hier
says. "People want to learn
about the dark side of human
nature, and since the Nazis
are the incarnation of that
evil, people remain absolutely
fascinated with the period."
The men who make the
movies, and make them one
at a time, steer clear of cosmic
analyses and are dubious
enough about the box office
appeal of the Holocaust to
downplay the subject in their
promotions.
"Foremost a gripping court-
room drama," says producer
Irwin Winkler of Music Box.
"A period film exploring love,
sexuality and marriage," notes
Paul Mazursky, producer, dir-
ector and co-screenwriter of
Enemies. Even producer
Arnold Kopelson, whose
Triumph of the Spirit focuses
most directly and graphically
on the horrors of the extermi-
nation camps, says his film
deals "with the life of a man,
his family and the woman he
loves."
The filmmakers also point
out that the inordinate gesta-
tion periods involved in bring-
ing movies, especially on
"difficult" subjects, from con-
ception to screen, make their
simultaneous releases a mat-
ter of sheer coincidence.
Co-producer Shimon Arama,
for instance, first conceived of
Triumph of the Spirit some 20
years ago, when he met Sal-
amo (Shlomo) Arouch in
Israel and discovered that
their common roots lay in the
Greek seaport city of Sal-
onica.
Arouch had a story to tell,
which, in its main outline,
was to become the plot for the
film. Salamo, like his father
and brother, worked as a

stevedore on the Salonica
docks. Small and wiry, Sal-
amo showed a talent for box-
ing and in a few years became
the light middleweight
champion of Greece, then of
the Balkans, and was bidding
for the European crown when
the Germans marched in.
In 1943, Salamo, his par-
ents, three sisters and a
brother were sent to Ausch-
witz-Birkenau, where he alone
survived. There the SS of-
ficers and guards amused
themselves by pitting boxers
from different barracks
against each other, with
Hitler's finest cheering on
"their" Jews and betting
heavily on the outcome. Each
match ended only when one
of the gladiators was com-
pletely knocked out, with the
loser facing almost certain
death in the gas chamber.
The winner lived to fight
another day and even was
"rewarded" with a loaf of
bread or an easier work detail.
Salamo fought more than 200
matches in two years, won
them all and was still on his
feet when the Russians liber-
ated Auschwitz.
Triumph is the first
Hollywood movie which the
Polish authorities allowed to
be filmed at Auschwitz, and
the actual locale combined
with the somberness of the
Polish winter lends the movie
a chilling veracity.
In this, in its attention to
detail, and in Willem Dafoe's
intense performance as Sal-
amo, the film achieves some-
thing notable. It is not so
much the scenes of ultimate
horror and sadism that stand
out, but the daily degrada-
tion, bone-weariness and in-
stinctive grasp for survival.
As in war, the truth of the