arts & entertainment
An Israeli Classic On The Small Screen
Israel's first hit movie — starring a young Chaim Topol — highlights TCM series.
Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News
A
half-century after its unexpected
and enormous success, Sallah
stands as a landmark of Israeli
cinema and a window on a bygone era.
Israeli columnist, author and satirist
Ephraim Kishon's 1964 film debut is a
take-no-prisoners, culture-clash comedy
about the "education" of a Sephardic
immigrant who wants nothing more than
a new house for his large family.
Improbably, the movie sold 1.5 million
tickets at home, played for nine months in
New York and received an Oscar nomina-
tion for Best Foreign Language Film.
The first film in the hugely prolific
career of producer Menachem Golan
(1929-2014), who passed away in early
August, Sallah also introduced actor
Chaim Topol (who later played Tevye in
the 1971 film version of Fiddler on the
Roof) to the wider world.
Newly restored for its 50th anniversary,
and recently screened and celebrated at the
Jerusalem Film Festival, Sallah airs at 10
p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 16, on Turner Classic
Movies (TCM) with another key title in the
Israeli canon, the 1955 battlefield drama
Hill 24 Doesn't Answer, at 8 p.m.
The black-and-white double bill is the
centerpiece of TCM's expansive series air-
ing Tuesdays in September, "The Projected
Image: The Jewish Experience on Film!'
Other highlights include the little-known
1934 historical drama The House of
Rothschild (8 p.m. Sept. 23, when the
theme is "Tackling Prejudice") and the ter-
rific World War II epic The Young Lions (8
p.m. Sept. 30), featuring Montgomery Clift
A scene from Sallah, starring Chaim Topol (center)
as a Jewish G.I. (one of four coming-of-age
sagas airing Sept. 30).
Sallah opens with the exuberant Sallah
(a bearded, hulking Topol) and his wide-
eyed brood deplaning in the Promised
Land, anticipating the streets to be paved
with opportunity, if not gold. After some
perfunctory form-filling, they are loaded
on a truck and taken to a transit camp of
tawdry shacks (and an unpaved street).
Sallah may be an old-school patriarch,
but he's also a schemer and ace negotiator,
albeit with his own standard of integrity.
He's determined that his family won't
remain in their leaky, rundown house for
long, no matter whose feathers he ruffles
or what angles he works.
Sallah has a little bit of everything —
from a musical number that foreshadows
Topol's onstage and onscreen portrayals of
Tevye to a dig at American Jewish bene-
factors who support the idea of Israel but
want nothing to do with the people work-
ing the fields.
A nearby kibbutz "adopts" the transit
camp and dispatches a pretty, geeky social
worker (a young Gila Almagor) with an
armful of forms who's no match for Sallah's
bluster and blather. The fledgling, unde-
veloped State of Israel may not be a model
of calm and order, but, by comparison,
Sallah is an anarchist with no understand-
ing or use for the prevailing procedures.
Viewers may cringe at Sallah's boorish-
ness, but it's the most effective response to
the Ashkenazi establishment's relentless
condescension to the pragmatic Sephardic
immigrants. The kibbutzniks see them-
selves as educated and progressive and the
Mizrahis as barbarians with primitive cus-
toms that they should abandon and forget.
"Forget?" Sallah responds angrily. "Why
should I forget? You always want us to for-
get what's not good for you:'
go to the women of his international cast,
including Janet McTeer as the head of
MI-6, Lubna Azabal as Atika and Katherine
Parkinson as Nessa's sister-in-law.
Blick says that having his story revolve
around women "was conscious to a
degree:'
He wondered, "What would happen if I
put women into the story and made them
protagonists? How would we explore their
psychology in the genre?"
Social experiments aside, The Honorable
Woman is a prime example of how good
television can be in the right hands. Smart,
taut storylines that delve into the politics
and the history of the conflict, at the same
time they unravel individual lives, make
the miniseries a wholly believable, fully
realized world that offers nuances and
observations about the ongoing Israel-
Palestinian struggle.
So how did Blick, who is best known
to American audiences as the actor who
portrayed a young Jack Napier before he
became the Joker in the 1989 version of
Batman — where he uttered the famous
non-sequitur, "Did you ever dance with
the devil in the pale moonlight?" — get
the go-ahead to create a program that
would require a commitment from viewers
to watch eight hours of sometimes-bloody,
sometimes-expository Middle East-centric
storylines with a female-heavy cast?
To hear the publicity-shy Blick (he
sounds delighted when told that the most
detailed personal information readily avail-
able about him begins and ends with his
birth year) tell it, it's all because no one else
wanted to do Marion and Geoff, a drama
about a cabbie that ran from 2000 to 2003.
As it happens, Sallah is defending the
cash payment he's demanded from his
daughter's matrimonially minded kib-
butznik boyfriend. His argument is sur-
prisingly persuasive, even to our modern
ears, and cuts to the core of the then-
existing inequality.
While Israel still has second-class citi-
zens — Ethiopian immigrants and Filipino
and Thai workers — it must be said that
Kishon's satire doesn't bite as hard today.
When Sallah was made, the kibbutz
symbolized Israel's idealism at home and
identity abroad. In the ensuing decades,
the presence and power of the kibbutzim
has waned.
At the same time, the friction between
Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews has been
overshadowed by the tension between fer-
vently religious and secular Jews. Finally, it
must be acknowledged that both the world
and movies are harsher than they were in
1964.
That is not to take anything away from
Kishon (1924-2005), a Hungarian-born
Holocaust survivor who lived in a transit
camp, kibbutz and housing project after
immigrating to Israel, and knew whereof
he wrote.
In particular, he was steeped in the les-
son that Sallah comes to learn: In Israel,
you get what you don't want.
❑
Sallah airs at 10 p.m. Tuesday, Sept.
16, on Turner Classic Movies (TCM).
For a complete listing of movies that
are part of TCM's "The Projected
Image: The Jewish Experience on
Film," visit www.tcm.com .
Honorable Woman from page 60
getting used to for viewers used to
resolutions presented within a traditional
film's two-hour running time. It produces
an immersive experience along the lines of
The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, two other
long-form shows that didn't shy away from
mixing introspective moments with plot-
necessitated violence.
"The meditative, contemplative pace
of this gives it a unique voice Blick says,
citing the influence of filmmakers like Jon
Boorman and Carol Reed, whose films like
Point Blank and Odd Man Out, respective-
ly, are paragons of the deliberately paced
psychological action thriller.
One way that Blick has differentiated The
Honorable Woman from both his predeces-
sors and, indeed, from the vast majority
of films and television being made today,
is by having virtually all of the lead roles
62
September 11 • 2014
JN
Lead actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is
Jewish in real life, and Hugo Blick, the
writer/director of The Honorable Woman,
focus on a scene during production.