I looked for anything about this film for years without luck. If I remember, it is without a music track. In any case, silence is an important element in the film. "Goldstein" is filled with the color and flavor of Chicago. Famous and new features of the city were many times featured cleverly in the tale. The eponymous character, Goldstein, appears as an old man with a full gray beard wading out of Lake Michigan in long johns in a way that suggests that he came from another realm or nowhere at all. A nearly silent character, he engages in scenes which are mime-like, silent and bizarre.
There is a scene in which Goldstein is in the back of a truck loaded with junk traveling on the nearly new and vast Dan Ryan Expressway. He is throwing items off the truck onto the expressway and a siren can be heard at a distance. Gradually the siren approaches, and a police car appears. It pulls up to the cab of the truck and the police look in. Seeing that no one is driving, after taking a beat, they speed on, siren still blaring, as if it was someone else they were chasing.
Another scene without Goldstein, but with a doctor played by Severn Darden, I believe, is riding in a car going up inside the Marina Towers, a cylindrical building with scalloped sections that stands just by the Chicago River. The absurd quality of the doctor's conversation is punctuated by the fact that they are going around and around, so not only does the journey seem interminable, it is entirely impossible that the car would have looped so many times.
These pieces deserve being shared because no one knows this movie. I won't tell more, but "Goldstein" is a forgotten comic masterpiece. I hope that it may be resurrected and live and that I live to see it. I remember it as black-and-white, so the film may be serviceable, if it exists, after 40 years.
