Arts & Life

Al Pacino as Shylock
in "William
Shakespeare's The
Merchant of Venice"

Shylock
On Screen

"Merchant" director

dignifies Shakespeare's

Jewish character

and braves controversy.

MICHAEL FOX

Special to the Jewish News

F

filmmaker Michael Radford is
learning firsthand what a slew of
- theater directors could have told

him.
Staging The Merchant of Venice, even in
a prestigious big-screen adaptation with
Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons, is a no-win
proposition.
On one side are scholars such as Ron
Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler.
In his column in the New York Observer,
Rosenbaum lambasted Radford's "mis-
guided" film for "sanitizing" the play of
its anti-Semitism.
But a moviegoer at the Q&A after a
New York screening expressed the oppo-
site view. "I love this film, but it's too
painful for me," she told Radford. "I'm a
survivor, and it is anti-Semitic and you
can't get away from it."
In a recent interview at a San Francisco

• -
hotel, the British director was friendly but
a tad defensive about William

Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice,

which opens Feb. 18 at the Detroit Film
Theatre. He seemed surprised by some of
the criticism aimed at the film, which
takes a sympathetic view of the Jewish
"villain" Shylock.
"Many great Jewish actors have taken
the role of Shylock, from Jacob Adler in
1903 through to Dustin Hoffman,"
Radford notes. "It's not a part that Jewish
actors avoid. [But] it is controversial
because when you first read it, there's so
much anti-Semitic language in it that it
just sticks in your throat. And I have to
say I think it's anachronistic. I think that
a lot of it is just the way that people
talked [back then]."
Radford trimmed many of those lines
as he devised the screenplay. But there's
no getting around the discrimination and
loathing that Shylock endures, for both
SHYLOCK ON SCREEN on page 49

Sig

2/17

2005

43