KIDNAPPED: THE ABDUCTION OF EDGARDO MORTARA / RAPITO (2023)

Fine as film, even more fascinating as a slice of Italian history, Marco Bellocchio ‘brings to the screen’ (as film trailers used to say on hard-to-sell period historicals) the true story of Edgardo Mortara, a six-yr-old Jew from a large wealthy family in 1850s Bologna who is kidnapped by the Pope.  At heart, that’s the story: call it PIUS IX AND THE BAPTIZED JEW.  Casually baptized in secret as an infant by a house servant, this act proves enough for the church to gather the boy and ‘orphanize’ him when his parents refuse to convert.  Held with other ‘removed’ boys, Edgardo's fate sealed by his finer qualities: exceptionally bright, well-behaved, observant, obedient, eager to please & be praised; a perfect candidate for Catholic indoctrination in ecumenical schooling.  Remarkably, international opinions & repercussions go entirely with the family, an event fed by press and public opinion which only hardens Pharaoh’s heart, so to speak.  And when the parents finally get to see their son, it’s less emotional reunion than ritualized abandonment.  Even an outburst with Mother only pushes Catholic authorities further against her for needlessly upsetting the boy.  Eventually, the case will be taken up as a liberal lever in the Italian Risorgimento, the progressive movement to unify the State under a figurehead King.  (Yes, Italian politics were counterintuitive even then.  For Freedom; Vote Royalty!)  Bellocchio is especially good at setting time & place (the Order of the Inquisition still active in the 1850s!), as well as keeping a lot of family & religious characters sorted, never sensaltionalizing the maddening facts.  Perhaps the film could use a bit of sensationalizing; it grows too tasteful at times.  It also runs a bit long (too many dream sequences?) along with a few odd musical choices  (Rachmaninoff?; Shostakovich?)  But this is nitpicking on a film that got lost in COVID days and deserves more views.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  With a name like Bellocchio, how could Marco not be a filmmaking natural?  Yet the brilliance of his debut with FISTS IN THE POCKET/’65 proved a mixed blessing, placing too much good work in the shade or taken for granted.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/fists-in-pocket-1965.html

POT O’ GOLD (1941)

James Stewart made three Frank Capra films; many more simply Capra-esque.  This is one of them.  His last release before WWII took him off the screen ‘for the duration.’  Five years later, he’d return with his final actual Capra film, IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE/’46 playing a small-town family business owner who dreams of leaving for bigger things.  So it’s a prescient surprise to have 1941 Stewart as a small town family business owner hoping to stay put.  That big job in the big city?; no thank you.  What is this, Bizarro IAWL?  And why so little known?  But one reel in, Stewart gives in to the biddings of crusty Uncle Charles Winninger to be heir apparent to the other family business, a big health food factory in the big, unhealthy city.  Once there, he soon stumbles upon a happy clan of musicians living the tenement commune life (it’s Paulette Goddard and her happy band, literally a happy band), and just like that, GOLD leaves IAWL behind and becomes a sort of ‘almost-musical’ variation on the first Stewart/Capra film, YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU/’38.  (That’s the Crazy family meets Capitalism; George Kaufman/Moss Hart stage classic.)  This idea far less interesting; and not much helped by director George Marshall*, a script, that lays it on thick (Mary Gordon’s Irish Dear a particular horror), and lots of bouncy, but generic tunes.  Musicals are hard enough to pull off.  Screwball semi-musicals, jumping in & out of stage conventions to allow people to break into song, way beyond the abilities of this crew.  Including the lousy vocal mismatch dubbing Goddard’s singing.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *The Hollywood director who might have pulled this off is Leo McCarey.  See him do it in THE BELLS OF ST. MARY’S/’46.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/11/bells-of-st-marys-1945.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Yes, producer James Roosevelt, in his sole feature credit, was FDR’s eldest boy.  No doubt, the guy who forgot to renew copyright which flooded the market with subfusc Public Domain copies.  Decent ones easy to find if you look around.

BARDEJOV (2024)

From the personal memories of its producer, Emil A. Fish, seven when he witnessed the events shown (now in his 80s, this his sole involvement with film), a modestly-scaled Holocaust story from Bardejov, Slovakia that plays like a local folk tale of cunning and hope.  It might be a superior After School Special about a roundup within the relatively well-to-do Jewish  community of Bardejov in the early 1940s, trying to survive under the constantly growing restrictions put on them as local officials & the Slovakian military follow Nazi orders passed along by their own government.  But in a small town where ethnic/religious lines are often crossed between friendly neighbors, so too are lines of command and loyalties.  An attitude that makes a daring life or death rescue just possible.  Robert Davi plays successful businessman Rafuel Lowy  head of what’s left of the Jewish Committees within the Town Council, his authority now little more than a front he maintains thru force of personality.  And when the latest edict comes down to send most of the young Jewish girls to work in a shoe factory hundreds of miles away he’s naturally suspicious.  Powerless, but with a few connections he can still call on, he learns their true destination, along with Jewish girls from all over the country is the Death Camps of Auschwitz.  The theme and storyline by now overly familiar, but there’s something to be said about a straightforward, uncomplicated telling.  And director Danny A. Abeckaser, shooting mostly in Israel, puts up a convincing Slovakian environment.  Or does once you adjust to accented English-language dialogue and filming technique/production values out of the 1950s.  Survivor Emil Fish was determined to get his story on film, not to chase humanitarian awards.  And that he does.  Just remember to set expectations at a reasonable level.  And to have a tolerance for a score that goes heavy on klezmer-like clarinet stylings.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The go-to orchestral tinta on Jewish stories used to be ‘cello heavy, now, it’s all swooping/squealing klezmer clarinet.