Nozz

I see from another review that this film was marketed to TV. And indeed it starts like a TV program, with a set of teasers to convince you to watch. And it claims to solve the last great mystery of cinematic history-- the mystery of what went wrong with Jerry Lewis's never-released film "The Day the Clown Cried." The documentary does apparently provide a definitive answer regarding the project's collapse as a business venture, and it shows us Lewis's own dissatisfaction with the footage although Lewis's own feelings and behavior are more difficult to explain and may to some extent remain a mystery forever. We do see several minutes of "The Day the Clown Cried," and it's obvious (to me at least) that one major mistake was casting Jerry Lewis himself as a German civilian in World War II when the New Jersey whine couldn't help creeping into his voice and putting him apart from the non-American actors playing the other Germans. Other criticisms are brought up, and they're all thought-provoking, even if-- unlike some of the interviewees-- you don't consider Jerry Lewis a great genius of 20th-century cinema.

For the commercial release in Israel, this movie's title was lengthened to "Real Estate: A Love Story." That ought to improve its positioning a little. The story is about a couple who need to get their act together if they're going to raise a baby-- who's already on her way. They also need to rent an apartment somewhere and, as the Jerusalem Post reviewer remarked, the places you see and the people you meet as you search for an apartment are a scriptwriter's dream and it's surprising that apartment-hunting movies aren't something like ten percent of the movies released. The succession of apartments and renters keeps the movie lively on a minute-to-minute basis while the character development takes its time. All the apartments are in Haifa, a city with a hilly geography that the audience, jumping from one street to another, unfortunately can't really feel that it's visited. But the audience can certainly feel that it's visited the troubled, sometimes comical lives of the determined apartment-hunters and had its sympathies given a workout.

This movie launched the career of writer/director Renen Schorr, who quickly took his place as an honored figure in Israeli cinema. The same can't be said of most of the young actors he recruited. Shot in the late 1980s, the movie harks back to the early 1970s when anti-war sentiment among draft-age youth was crossing the ocean from the USA into Israel but the Israeli nation, then as now, faced an enemy at closer quarters than the Americans did.

Regarding movies like this one, it was observed that because of the strong communal heritage of Israeli society, the ambition of young Israeli directors is to turn out movies not about a single protagonist's ambitions or problems but about a circle of friends. Such movies don't succeed so well in general among viewers in the more individualistic West. But "Late Summer Blues" is still regarded as a classic in Israel, it went through restoration some years ago, and Renen Schorr returned to it in a filmed memoir. "HaMeorer," where the conflict is not between heartfelt anti-war sentiment and national necessity but between a traditionally pious Jewish life and a life of filmmaking.