Tag Archives: Adolf Hitler

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Adam Breier’s All About the Levkoviches is part of 2024 NYJFF

THIRTY-THIRD ANNUAL NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
January 10-24, $14-$17
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
thejewishmuseum.org

With the scourge that is antisemitism on the rise yet again, this time spurred by Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack on Israel and the IDF’s military response, it feels like a political statement just to attend the thirty-third annual New York Jewish Film Festival, taking place January 10–24 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. The 2024 iteration consists of more than two dozen features, documentaries, and shorts from Hungary, Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, Austria, the UK, Israel, Ukraine, and America, exploring such topics as antisemitism, family estrangement, Nazi-looted art, the 1976 trial of Pierre Goldman, Klezmer music, survival in the desert, excommunicated philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and the Shabbos goy.

The opening night selection is the New York premiere of James Hawes’s One Life, in which Sir Anthony Hopkins portrays Sir Nicholas Winton, an unassuming British stockbroker who was a quiet WWII hero; producer Joanna Laurie will participate in a postscreening discussion. The centerpiece film is the New York premiere of Michal Vinik’s Valeria Is Getting Married, about two Ukrainian sisters who come to Israel and get involved in contemporary arranged marriages. The festival closes with Ron Frank’s documentary Remembering Gene Wilder, a celebration of the beloved stage and screen star, with reminiscences from Mel Brooks, Alan Alda, Carol Kane, Harry Connick Jr., Rain Pryor, and others; the New York premiere will be introduced by executive producer Julie Nimoy and followed by a talk with Frank, writer Glenn Kirschbaum, and Peter Ostrum, who played Charlie Bucket in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, his only film role.

Below are five films to watch out for; most screenings throughout the festival will be followed by a discussion with directors, producers, subjects, cast members, or experts.

The 1939 Yiddish melodrama Mothers of Today will be shown at NYJFF in a 35mm restoration

MOTHERS OF TODAY (Henry Lynn, 1939)
Thursday, January 11, 2:30
Sunday, January 14, 12:00
www.filmlinc.org

Yiddish radio star Esther Field, the “Yiddishe Mama,” made her only film appearance in Henry Lynn’s 1939 shund film, Mothers of Today, being shown in a 35mm restoration at the festival, followed by a discussion with National Center for Jewish Film codirectors Lisa Rivo and Sharon Rivo. It’s a working-class immigration melodrama about a widow trying to hold on to Jewish tradition as her children begin straying from the religion in America. The film was shot in the Bronx and features Jewish songs and prayers, including the Kiddush, “Got Fun Avrohom,” and Kol Nidrei.

Gad Elmaleh’s autobiographical comedy Stay with Us deals with religious conversion

STAY WITH US (Gad Elmaleh, 2022)
Thursday, January 11, 5:30
Wednesday, January 24, 4:00
www.filmlinc.org

A minor controversy erupted when it was reported in 2022 that Moroccan-Canadian-French Jewish comedian and actor Gad Elmaleh had converted to Christianity. It wasn’t true, but Elmaleh had studied Christianity extensively, resulting in his autobiographical comedy Stay with Us, in which he plays a Jewish man named Gad who announces to his family, played by his actual mother, father, and sister, that he is converting to Catholicism. Just wait till you see his parents’ reaction when his mother finds a statue of the Virgin Mary in his suitcase. “Get your fingers off it!” his father declares.

The Books He Didn’t Burn goes inside Adolf Hitler’s private library

THE BOOKS HE DIDN’T BURN (Claus Bredenbrock & Jascha Hannover, 2023)
Monday, January 15, 1:00
www.filmlinc.org

Jeremy Irons narrates Claus Bredenbrock and Jascha Hannover’s The Books He Didn’t Burn, which asks the question “Can literature provide a handbook for mass murder?” as American historian Timothy Ryback examines Adolf Hitler’s book collection, which totaled sixteen thousand at the time of his suicide. “Our whole notion, going back to the ancient Greeks, that art, beauty, literature ennobles the human spirit . . . Hitler’s library turns this whole thing on its head,” Ryback says in the film. Hannover will participate in a discussion after the screening.

Isabelle Cottenceau immerses viewers into the life and career of designer Gaby Aghion in Looking for Chloé

LOOKING FOR CHLOÉ (Isabelle Cottenceau, 2023)
Saturday, January 20, 7:00
www.filmlinc.org

The Jewish Museum is currently hosting the wide-ranging exhibition “Mood of the Moment: Gaby Aghion and the House of Chloé,” about the Jewish Egyptian entrepreneur who founded the French fashion house Chloé. In Looking for Chloé, Isabelle Cottenceau follows the life and career of Gaby Aghion, who was born Gabrielle Hanoka in Egypt in 1921; launched Chloé in 1952; hired Karl Lagerfeld, Stella McCartney, and Phoebe Philo; and had such clients as Brigitte Bardot, Jackie Kennedy, and Maria Callas. Aghion was married to her husband, gallery owner and fellow political activist and intellectual Raymond Aghion, for nearly seventy years and was a leader in the development of prêt-à-porter. Producer Sophie Jeaneau and Museum at FIT director Dr. Valerie Steele will be on hand for a postscreening discussion.

Adam Low digs deep into James Joyce’s 1922 novel, Ulysses, in 2022 doc

JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES (Adam Low, 2022)
Sunday, January 21, 1:00
www.filmlinc.org

In honor of the centennial of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, documentarian Adam Low goes behind-the-scenes of the writing, publication, and legacy of the notoriously difficult 1922 novel, set during one June day in Dublin in 1904. In the film, British journalist and novelist Howard Jacobson declares that the book is “the greatest Jewish novel of the twentieth century — the first one with a Jew at its very center,” Leopold Bloom. Low also speaks with Salman Rushdie, Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Eimear McBride, Paul Muldoon, John McCourt, Nuala O’Connor, Vivienne Igoe, and others as he details the heroic efforts by such people as Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Sylvia Beach, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and Nora Barnacle, who played such important roles in its ultimate success. Low and producer Martin Rosenbaum will be on hand for a postscreening talk.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

Nazi leader Albert Speer tries to whitewash history in Speer Goes to Hollywood

SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD (Vanessa Lapa, 2021)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, October 29
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
speergoestohollywood.com

In 2014, Belgium-born, Israel-based documentarian Vanessa Lapa made her feature-length debut with The Decent One, in which she painted a frightening portrait of Heinrich Himmler, using the private diary of the Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (Himmler’s official title). She has now followed that film with Speer Goes to Hollywood, which incorporates archival footage from the Nuremberg trials and clips from propaganda films accompanying forty hours of recordings made in 1971 by up-and-coming British screenwriter Andrew Birkin as he worked with convicted Nazi leader Albert Speer, known as Hitler’s Architect, collaborating on a screenplay for Paramount Pictures based on the former Reichsminister of Munitions’ bestselling memoir, Inside the Third Reich.

Birkin, the brother of model and actress Jane Birkin and whose mentors include Stanley Kubrick and Carol Reed, met with Speer in the latter’s country home in Heidelberg in the winter of 1971. Birkin kept the tape rolling as he and Speer carefully reviewed every scene in the screenplay, as Speer tries to whitewash many of the more outrageous and gruesome details regarding his culpability in the Nazis’ reign of terror while Birkin tries to not let him off the hook.

“I would be careful,” Reed (The Third Man, Oliver!) warns Birkin over the phone after reviewing the first draft of the script. “You can’t build without him knowing. The man holds his mind blank to that. This is not a sweet man.”

Tall and elegant, Speer seizes control of the narrative again and again, claiming to be a dreamer and making sure he is seen with his dog, as if he’s just a normal guy. “I want a private life too,” he opines. He considers war “an adventure” and the Nazi regime “just good fun” to downplay the piles of murdered bodies the Third Reich left in its wake. He refers to the tortured prisoners of war in factories and the concentration camps as workmen and laborers, making excuses that argue that the negative aspects of what the Nazis did have been exaggerated. “I did not know what crimes I’m committing,” he claims. He explains that the “camps were necessary” and blames his Labor Department head, Fritz Sauckel, for the mistreatment of the Jews and other captives under his watch. “I was not responsible for those things. It was him,” he points out.

All the while, Birkin attempts to convince himself that he is doing the right thing by sharing Speer’s story on film. “I’ve been saying all along that I find it easy to identify myself with you,” he tells Speer. “The only point where I think I would have opted out would have been if I had been present or if I witnessed a scene that involved children being carted off. Can you ever remember a situation where you either read about, or more probably heard about, children being separated up or families being torn apart? Anything. Can you ever remember anything that happened? Even if, at the time, you were able to rationalize it?” Speer says no, “But . . . Yes, well, but you know, small things are now seen as the center of a thing. But I’m sorry. It would be wrong to say now I had a sentimental reaction or so. Your idea of the film and of my person that I had any reaction is wrong.”

Speer talks about Himmler, Hermann Göring, and Joseph Goebbels and admits to being one of Hitler’s best friends — and still claims he did not know what was going on despite his heavy involvement with the Mathausen camp and his visit to Auschwitz. “Indirectly, I knew from Hitler that he was planning to annihilate the Jewish people. He said it quite often. But I had no direct knowledge until ’44.” Seeking to garner some sympathy, he says, “If ever I can get rid of the guilt, and quite often I was thinking that I never shall get rid of it, that this burden will ever last with me.”

Albert Speer is profiled in new documentary built around revelatory footage

Birkin might want to give Speer the benefit of the doubt to some degree, but it’s hard for viewers to see anything but a twisted man who lacks empathy and compassion for his fellow human being, lording his sense of superiority over all others, trying to skirt his responsibilities during the war and rewrite history — a project that cannot help but make one reflect on the way America is these days when it comes to slavery, remembering the Holocaust, removing public statues of the founding fathers, tearing apart immigrant families at the border, and changing textbooks to present partisan views of the nation’s past.

Explaining one of Kubrick’s arguments, Birkin (The Name of the Rose, The Cement Garden) says the director told him, “I would find it very difficult to do the film if your character, the Speer in the film, you still made out that he didn’t know what was going on.” Speer just wanted a normal life, reveling in his being called “the good Nazi,” but as Lapa’s film shows, there is not a whole lot of good in him.

Winner of the Israeli Oscar for Best Documentary, Speer Goes to Hollywood is a chilling work that gets into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s most terrifying figures. Lapa and producer Tomer Eliav will be at Film Forum for the 7:00 shows on October 29 and 30 for Q&As that will dig even deeper into this extraordinary story.

THE MEANING OF HITLER

New documentary delves into who Adolf Hitler was and how he rose to power, with rare color footage

THE MEANING OF HITLER (Michael Tucker & Petra Epperlein, 2021)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave.
Opens Friday, August 13
www.ifccenter.com

“Has history lost all meaning?” a narrator asks in The Meaning of Hitler. “Is it possible to make a film like this without contributing to the expansion of the Nazi cinematic universe?”

Over the last several decades, the word “Nazi” has been used as a derogatory comment not only for mean-spirited people who enforce their own bizarre rules — think Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi character — but also when political figures don’t like what they believe to be controlling legislation and ideals from a rival party (see Marjorie Taylor Greene). As the word begins to lose its historical reference and becomes normalized — the Nazis are responsible for the senseless, brutal murder of more than thirteen million people, which is anything but normal — so does the name of the man who was the leader of the National Socialists, Adolf Hitler. But the current rise of antisemitism, the election victories of far-right candidates around the world, and the inability of the populace to see through the shady veneer of these demagogues drove husband-and-wife documentarians Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein to make The Meaning of Hitler. You probably have seen a lot of films about the Holocaust, but not one like this, which delves into who Hitler was, what made him that way, and how we can prevent another similar personality from taking power.

Tucker and Epperlein use Sebasian Haffner’s 1978 book of the same name as a guide as they follow Hitler’s trajectory, from his childhood home, to his failure as an artist, to his first, unsuccessful coup attempt, to his successful march to domination. Do we need more books and films about Hitler? “Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Hitler is how he resists understanding. There is not one historian, apart from Haffner, who claims to understand him,” says author Martin Amis. “Our understanding of Hitler is central to understanding ourselves. It’s a reckoning you have to make if you’re a serious person.” Professor Yehuda Bauer opines, “You cannot put Hitler on a psychologist’s couch,” while professor Saul Friedländer wishes the filmmakers “Good luck,” intimating that trying to figure out Hitler is a lost cause.

But try they do. In chapters such as “Chaos,” “Legend,” “Hitler Had No Friends,” “The Orator,” “The Hitler Cult,” and “The Good Nazi Years,” taken from Shaffner’s short volume, Tucker and Epperlein travel to Hitler’s ancestral village, the Berlin bunker where he killed himself, Vienna, his Wolf’s Lair headquarters, Flanders, Munich, Berchtesgarden (where Hitler “vacationed” for important photo opportunities), Paris, Warsaw, and Israel, locations where Hitler either lived, visited, or had a major impact on as he utilized the media to spread his message of hate. Forensic biologist Dr. Mark Benecke talks about his examination of Hitler’s skull fragments. Audio guru Klaus Heyne discusses how a new microphone, which became known as the Hitler Bottle, allowed the führer to shout out to impossibly large, adoring crowds, comparing it to the Beatles at Shea Stadium. Archaeologist Wojciech Mazurek describes how they will be digging at the former location of the Sobibor death camp, known as the Unknowable Spot, in order to account for the victims of the Nazis.

The filmmakers (Gunner Palace, Karl Marx City), who wrote, directed, edited, and produced the documentary, with Tucker serving as cinematographer and sound designer as well, give ample time to Holocaust denier David Irving, who offers tours of Nazi sites, celebrating Hitler; while claiming he is not antisemitic, he makes several slurs on camera. He adds, “Forget about Auschwitz; it’s unimportant.” They also speak with professor Deborah Lipstadt, who was sued by Irving for libel but won the court case.

Among the others who share their thoughts on Hitler and the Nazis are Dr. Peter Theiss-Abendroth, historian Sir Richard Evans, author Francine Prose, professor and sociologist Klaus Theweleit, and Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld; they don’t paint a pretty picture, which is how curator Sarah Forgey describes Hitler’s artwork.

Throughout the film, there are short clips of how Hitler and the Nazis have been portrayed in cinema, including scenes from Mel Brooks’s The Producers — yes, “Springtime for Hitler” — The Bunker, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, Hitler: Dead or Alive, Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will, and others. But it takes a critical turn when the focus shifts to the current wave of nationalism, anti-immigration, online radicalization, and public demonstrations, particularly related to Donald Trump and the United States. The historians are quite clear about how Trump uses the Hitler playbook in his rhetoric and actions. Professor Ute Frevert notes about Hitler, “It’s consent. He never found anybody who objected. They all said, ‘Well, we believe you. We trust you. We love you,’” which echoes not just how Trump’s cult unconditionally support the former president but what the former TV reality show host said about the rioters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6. And Dr. Mathias Irlinger warns us, “Every year, lots of people come [to Berchtesgarden] because they still believe in Hitler, they still believe in Nazi ideology. The discussion ‘How to deal with the history’ will never stop.”

The revision, whitewashing, and erasure of so much history is why films like The Meaning of Hitler must continue to be made, especially as the last generation of Holocaust survivors and witnesses pass away. If we don’t figure out “What made Hitler Hitler?,” as the film asks, how can we say it will never happen again, even in our own backyard?

TICKET GIVEAWAY: MY PARSIFAL CONDUCTOR

my parsifal conductor

MY PARSIFAL CONDUCTOR: A WAGNERIAN COMEDY
Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater at the West Side YMCA
10 West 64th Street
Tuesday – Sunday, September 25 – November 3, $67
866-811-4111
myparsifalconductor.com

The debates over whether German composer Richard Wagner was anti-Semitic have raged for more than a century, particularly since Adolf Hitler and the Nazis incorporated his music into their march for power. (Wagner died in 1883 at the age of sixty-nine.) One of his works that generates complaints of anti-Semitism is his final opera, 1880’s Parsifal, about the search for the Holy Grail. Writer, director, and producer Allan Leicht, who won a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Writing for Ryan’s Hope and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for the TV movie Adam, explores the topic in My Parsifal Conductor: A Wagnerian Comedy, which was inspired by the real-life situation in which King Ludwig II of Bavaria commanded that German Jew Hermann Levi, the son of a rabbi, will conduct the inaugural performance of Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival in 1882. The cast features Eddie Korbich as Wagner, Claire Brownwell as Cosima, his wife, Geoffrey Cantor as Levi, Carlo Bosticco as King Ludwig II, Logan James Hall as Friedrich Nietzsche, Alison Cimmet as Dora, and Jazmin Gorsline as Carrie and Sophie. My Parsifal Conductor is directed by Robert Kalfin (Happy End, Yentl) and produced by Ted Snowdon (The Elephant Man, My Name Is Asher Lev).

The cast of My Parsifal Conductor (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The cast of My Parsifal Conductor readies for show about Wagner and anti-Semitism (photo by Carol Rosegg)

TICKET GIVEAWAY: My Parsifal Conductor runs September 25 through November 3 (with an October 11 opening) at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater at the West Side YMCA, and twi-ny has two pairs of tickets to give away for free. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and favorite play involving opera to contest@twi-ny.com by Friday, September 28, at 3:00 pm to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; two winners will be selected at random.

THE LAST LAUGH

Gilbert Gottfried is one of many comedians discussing humor and the Holocaust in THE LAST LAUGH

THE LAST LAUGH (Ferne Pearlstein, 2016)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema
1886 Broadway at 63rd St.
Opens Friday, March 3
212-757-2280
www.lastlaughfilm.us
www.lincolnplazacinema.com

“Without humor I don’t think we would have survived,” an elderly man says at a Holocaust survivors convention in Las Vegas in Ferne Pearlstein’s The Last Laugh. “Sorry, I didn’t find any humor at all, just sadness and tragedy,” a senior citizen sitting next to him counters. In 1993, Pearlstein’s friend Kent Kirshenbaum gave her a forty-page college paper he had written entitled “The Last Laugh: Humor and the Holocaust,” telling her to make a film about it. Pearlstein’s resultant thought-provoking, poignant documentary, which focuses on the limits of bad taste in comedy, has been playing the festival circuit all over the world and is now opening March 3 at Lincoln Plaza. In the film, Pearlstein speaks with such comic greats as Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Harry Shearer, Jeffrey Ross, Lisa Lampanelli, David Steinberg, Susie Essman, writer Alan Zweibel, writer-director Larry Charles, and Rob Reiner, as well as former Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman and author Shalom Auslander, who share their views on the relationship between comedy and tragedy. “The thing about a joke about the Holocaust, the AIDS crisis, 9/11 — it’s all about the funny,” Jewish lesbian comedian Judy Gold explains. “It’s gotta be funny.” Sarah Silverman, who has never met a boundary she wouldn’t dare to cross, notes, “Comedy puts light onto darkness, and darkness can’t live where there’s light. So that’s why it’s important to talk about things that are taboo because otherwise they just stay in this dark place and they become dangerous.” And Auschwitz survivor Robert Clary, who starred as Corporal Louis LeBeau on Hogan’s Heroes, the controversial 1960s sitcom set in a German WWII POW camp, laughs as he points out, “You have to have a sense of humor. If you don’t have a sense of humor, just go to your grave or get cremated or something.”

The heart and soul of the film is remarkable Auschwitz survivor Renee Firestone, whom Pearlstein follows as she visits her husband’s resting place, stops for lunch in an old Nazi bunker with her daughter Klara, goes to a Holocaust museum, watches stand-up comedy online, and does the dishes while discussing her encounter with Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who performed experiments on Jewish men, women, and children, including Firestone’s sister, who was killed at Auschwitz. “Most people don’t expect survivors to have much humor after the Holocaust, and that’s really not the case at all,” Klara says. “The survivors actually have some of the worst gallows humor ever. And I guess that they’re the only ones allowed to do that.” The Last Laugh, which shares its name with F. W. Murnau’s 1924 German Expressionist classic, was inspired in part by the 2005 documentary The Aristocrats, about an industry-secret improvisational taboo joke that Gilbert Gottfried surprisingly revealed to the public shortly after 9/11; he had told what many believe to be the first professional 9/11 joke and, not getting any laughs, quipped, “Too soon?”

Auschwitz survivor Renee Firestone and director Ferne Pearlstein prepare for a scene in THE LAST LAUGH

Pearlstein, who directed and edited the film and wrote and produced it with her husband, Robert Edwards, includes clips from such television shows as Curb Your Enthusiasm, Da Ali G Show, All in the Family, The Larry Sanders Show, Seinfeld, and Chappelle’s Show and such comics as Louis CK, Amy Schumer, Chris Rock, George Carlin, Ricky Gervais, and Joan Rivers, who died two days before she was going to be interviewed by Pearlstein. One of the most fascinating aspects of the film is watching these expert comics talk about the crafting of a joke, what makes it work — and where it can go wrong. The film highlights Brooks’s The Producers, which is about the faux Broadway musical Springtime for Hitler, and his 1978 comedy special, Peeping Times, consisting of home movies of Adolf Hitler as portrayed by Brooks. “Anything I could do to deflate Germans — I did,” Brooks proudly proclaims. There’s also footage of concentration camp entertainment from Theresienstadt and none-too-favorable explorations of Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful and Jerry Lewis’s infamous, never-to-be-seen The Day the Clown Died. “You can do jokes about Nazis,” Gottfried says, sitting in Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse on the Lower East Side, “but if you say ‘Holocaust,’ then it becomes bad taste.” But maybe Carl Reiner sums it up best: “I don’t have a philosophy about it. I just know that it’s much more fun to laugh than not to laugh.” Pearlstein will be at Lincoln Plaza for Q&As following the 7:30 show on March 3 and the 5:15 screenings on March 4 and 5.

THE TRAMP 100: THE TRAMP MARATHON

A Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) and an abandoned child (Jackie Coogan) form a family in THE KID

THE KID (Charles Chaplin, 1921)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Wednesday, January 1, 1:00
Series runs January 1-7
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Nearly one hundred years ago, in February 1914, Charlie Chaplin debuted one of cinema’s most endearing characters, the Tramp, in the Keystone shorts Kid Auto Races at Venice and Mabel’s Strange Predicament. Film Forum is paying tribute to the waddling, mustachioed vagrant with a weeklong festival highlighted by a New Year’s Day marathon of six of Chaplin’s best. The all-day party begins, appropriately enough, with Chaplin’s first feature, The Kid, which was a breakthrough for the British-born silent-film star, a touching and tender sixty-eight-minute triumph about a poor soul getting a second chance at life. When a baby arrives at his doorstep, a Tramp (Chaplin) first tries to ditch the boy, but he ends up taking him to his ramshackle apartment and raising him as if he were his own flesh and blood. Although he has so little, the Tramp makes sure the child, eventually played by Jackie Coogan, has food to eat, clothes to wear, and books to read. Meanwhile, the mother (Edna Purviance, Chaplin’s former lover), who has become a big star, regrets her earlier decision and wonders where her son is, setting up a heartbreaking finale. In addition to playing the starring role, Chaplin wrote, produced, directed, and edited the film and composed the score for his company, First National, wonderfully blending slapstick comedy, including a hysterical street fight with an angry neighbor, with touching melodrama as he examines poverty in post-WWI America, especially as seen through the eyes of the orphan boy, played beautifully by Coogan, who went on to marry Betty Grable, among others, and star as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family. Chaplin’s innate ability to tell a moving story primarily through images reveals his understanding of cinema’s possibilities, and The Kid holds up as one of his finest, alongside such other silent classics as 1925’s The Gold Rush and 1931’s City Lights. The film will be preceded by the 1919 short A Day’s Pleasure, in which Chaplin and Purviance play Coogan’s parents. The double feature is also screening January 5 at 5:20.

Charlie Chaplin seeks to strike it rich in THE GOLD RUSH

THE GOLD RUSH (Charles Chaplin, 1925)
Wednesday, January 1, 2:30
www.filmforum.org

Film Forum’s Charlie Chaplin marathon continues with the recently restored 35mm print of the complete version of The Gold Rush, with a newly recorded orchestral score. Made four years prior to the Great Depression, the slapstick comedy, which Chaplin called “the picture I want to be remembered by,” is still remarkably socially relevant, tackling unemployment, crime, hunger, and poverty. Chaplin, who wrote, produced, and directed the silent masterpiece, stars as the Lone Prospector, a little tramp who has set out to strike it rich during the Alaskan Gold Rush of 1848 but isn’t really having much luck. He takes shelter during a snowstorm in a small shack, does battle with a pair of much bigger men, turns into a chicken, and, yes, eats his shoe, doing whatever it takes to survive. The prescient film was originally to star Lita Grey as the love interest, but Chaplin impregnated (and later married) the sixteen-year-old, so she was replaced by Georgia Hale. The cast also features Mack Swain as Big Jim McKay, Malcolm Waite as ladies’ man Jack Cameron, and Tom Murray as Black Larsen. (And by the way, if you’ve only seen Chaplin’s reedited 1942 version with his own treacly narration and score, well, you’ve never really experienced this American treasure.) The Gold Rush is also screening New Year’s Eve at 7:00 and on January 5 & 6.

The Little Tramp falls in love with a blind flower girl in CITY LIGHTS

CITY LIGHTS (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
Wednesday, January 1, 5:30
www.filmforum.org

Another genuine American treasure, City Lights is one of Chaplin’s most thoroughly entertaining masterpieces. Serving as writer, director, editor, producer, and composer, Chaplin also stars as the Little Tramp, a destitute man who instantly falls in love upon seeing a blind Flower Girl (Virginia Cherrill). When she mistakes him for a millionaire with a fancy car, he decides to pretend to be rich so she might like him, but when he actually becomes pals with the business tycoon (Harry Myers), he thinks he might eventually be able to get the money for her to get a new operation that could restore her eyesight. The only problem is that the millionaire, who parties wildly with the Little Tramp every evening, taking him to ritzy nightclubs and even giving him his car at one point, remembers nothing the next morning and doesn’t want anything to do with him. It all leads to an unforgettable conclusion that pulls at the heartstrings. Despite the availability of sound, Chaplin chose to make City Lights a silent picture, although he did incorporate sound effects and, in one section, distorted speech. Although the film features several hysterical slapstick bits, including the opening, when the Little Tramp is sleeping on a statue entitled “Peace and Prosperity” as it is unveiled, and a scene in which he saves the millionaire from a suicide attempt, virtually every minute comments on the social reality of depression-era America and the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Metaphors abound as the Little Tramp tries his best to maintain a smile and search out love during the bleakest of times. The film will also be shown four times on January 4.

Charlie Chaplin gets caught up in the cogs of machinery in MODERN TIMES

MODERN TIMES (Charles Chaplin, 1936)
Wednesday, January 1, 7:20
www.filmforum.org

As America slowly recovered from the Great Depression and headed toward the Second World War, Charlie Chaplin also found himself trapped between the past and the future. Talkies had started in 1927 with Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, but the British-born actor, writer, director, producer, and composer had not crossed over yet, still favoring the silent cinema that had made him an international star. But his 1936 masterpiece, Modern Times, tackled the coming of the modern era in myriad ways, both public and personal, in the world at large as well as in cinema itself. Chaplin stars as an assembly line worker who literally gets caught up in the cogs of machinery, suffers a nervous breakdown, gets sent to prison for leading a Communist march he was not a part of, accidentally dabbles in a little nose candy, and falls in love with a homeless gamin who lives by her wits on the docks, played by his real-life lover, Paulette Goddard. He tries to fit in to the ever-changing society, without much luck; he even has trouble getting himself arrested again, thinking that jail is a better option than what’s out there. The unemployed former factory worker and the gamin move into a run-down shack and try to pretend that they are a happy, successful married couple, but the harsh reality of their poor existence continually thwarts them. Modern Times is a brutally funny, honest, and insightful examination of the socioeconomic conditions of America in the 1930s. As corporations began to grow, workers became nameless automatons; in fact, neither of the film’s protagonists is given a name. For the first time, Chaplin uses sound, but always in ingenious ways: the factory owner, who watches his workers like a hawk, using surveillance cameras that are remarkably prescient, talks only via a screen as he yells at his employees; music, which Chaplin previously utilized only on the backing soundtrack, now comes from bands seen on camera, as if they’re playing live; and the Little Tramp himself gets into the act as a singing waiter, although it’s not exactly like Garbo breaking her on-screen silence. Chaplin’s choice to include some sound while still avoiding even a single strand of actual dialogue between characters is a brash commentary on the technological revolution that was taking hold of the country and, of course, impacting the film industry. Chaplin’s previous movie, the 1931 classic City Lights, was a more traditional silent film, but with his next work, 1940’s The Great Dictator, he finally made the transition to a full talkie, albeit still finding himself trapped between two worlds, playing both a poor ghetto barber and the Fascist Hitler-like leader of Tomania. Modern Times can also be seen four times on January 3.

Paulette Goddard and Charlie Chaplin take on the Third Reich in his first talkie, THE GREAT DICTATOR

THE GREAT DICTATOR (Charles Chaplin, 1940)
Wednesday, January 1, 9:10
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Learning of many of the horrible things the Third Reich was doing, Charlie Chaplin could not hold his tongue anymore, finally making his first talking picture in 1940. In The Great Dictator, writer-director-producer Chaplin unrelentingly mocks Adolf Hitler and the rise of the Nazis in Germany, albeit with a very serious edge, as WWII threatens. Chaplin plays the dual roles of a simple Jewish barber living in the ghetto (who has elements of the Little Tramp) and Adenoid Hinkle, the rather Hitler-esque Fascist leader of the country of Tomania. Just as he named the nation after a food-borne illness (ptomaine poisoning), Chaplin does not go for subtlety in the film; his right-hand man is Herr Garbitsch (Henry Daniel spoofing Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels), and his military mastermind is Field Marshal Herring (Billy Gilbert making fun of Heinrich Himmler). Chaplin plays Hinkle like a cartoon character, with pratfalls galore, and when he speaks in German, especially when he gives a major speech, he spits out fake German words with a smattering of funny English ones. When he learns that Benzino Napaloni (Jack Oakie as a melding of Benito Mussolini and Napoleon Bonaparte) has gathered his troops on the Osterlitz border (think Anschluss), Hinkle invites the Bacteria dictator to his Tomanian palace, where they engage in numerous hysterical bouts of one-upmanship, including a riotous battle involving barber chairs. Meanwhile, Chaplin performs another of the film’s most memorable scenes, the shave of an old man set to Brahms’s “Hungarian Dance No. 5.” But when Commander Schultz (Reginald Gardiner) leaves the Nazi regime and decides to help the Jewish people in the ghetto, Hinkle sends his stormtroopers out to find the traitor, leading to a major case of mistaken identity and a heartfelt, if overly melodramatic, finale. Chaplin’s lover at the time, Paulette Goddard, plays Hannah (named for Chaplin’s mother), a young Jewish woman living in the ghetto, and Bowery Boys fans will recognize Bernard Gorcey, who played sweet-shop owner Louie Dombrowski in the goofy film series, as Mr. Mann.

Charlie Chaplin plays dual roles while examining Fascism and anti-Semitism in classic comedy

Charlie Chaplin plays dual roles while taking on Fascism and anti-Semitism in classic comedy

A seminal achievement that was supposedly seen by Hitler twice, The Great Dictator is filled with marvelous moments, from Hinkle dancing with a balloon globe to several of the Jews in the ghetto trying to hide in the same chest, but the film does suffer from pedagoguery in making its political points, and some of the slapstick is too lowbrow. Nominated for five Oscars, it falls somewhere between the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933) and the Three Stooges’ You Nazty Spy! (1940) while also referencing the 1921 silent film King, Queen, Joker, in which Chaplin’s older half-brother, Sidney (who also directed), played the dual role of a modest barber and the king of the fictional Coronia. The Great Dictator is also screening twice on January 5. The series continues through January 7 with The Circus (including 4:00 on New Year’s Day), six shorts programs divided into Chaplin’s days at First National, Essanay, Mutual, and Keystone, and Kevin Brownlow and David Gill’s 1983 documentary, Unknown Chaplin.

WORKING ON A SPECIAL DAY

Gabriel (Antonio Vega) and Antonietta (Ana Graham) discuss life, love, and fascism in WORKING ON A SPECIAL DAY (photo by Carol Rosegg)

59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 17, $35
212-279-4200
www.59e59.org

It’s May 8, 1938, and there’s a parade making its way through the streets of Rome celebrating Adolf Hitler’s visit with Benito Mussolini as the Fascist leaders plot their takeover of Europe. A bored housewife, Antonietta (Ana Graham), is left alone by her husband and kids, cleaning the apartment and doing the laundry while everyone else heads out to the festivities. After her parrot flies out of its cage and out the window, Antonietta tracks it down in the apartment of a stranger, Gabriel (Antonio Vega), the only other person remaining in the complex. Unbeknownst to Antonietta, Gabriel was about to blow his brains out until she suddenly showed up. Soon the two lonely souls are sharing secrets and more in the offbeat yet engaging Working on a Special Day. The seventy-five-minute show was adapted and translated by Graham, Vega, and Danya Taymor from Ettore Scola’s Academy Award–nominated 1977 film, Una giornata particolare, which starred Sophia Loren as Antonietta, Marcello Mastroianni as Gabriele, and John Vernon as Antonietta’s husband (played onstage by Vega also). The intriguing drama takes place in small black box theater in which two of the walls and a pair of doorways are like chalkboards that Graham and Vega constantly draw on, creating windows, telephones, a birdcage, and more. They also make all the sound effects themselves. Thus, when Graham makes the sound of a telephone, Vega draws one on the wall and pretends to answer it. It’s an odd conceit that grows more endearing as the two characters spend more time together and get to know each other much better. Although it’s not interactive or participatory, it is warm and welcoming; when the two actors first appear, the house lights are on, and they change into their costumes using actual seats in the audience, as if crowd and performer are one and the same. A coproduction of the New York–based Play Company and Mexico City’s Por Piedad Teatro Foundation, Working on a Special Day has been extended at 59E59 through February 17.