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.