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MOISHE KAPOYR When heavy-smoking Sylvia Sidney in 1973’s Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams is having a first stage heart attack on a street in New York City and is coherent enough to complain about shooting pains in her neck and arm, her daughter Joanne Woodward, who’s standing next to her, is such a mink-clad yutzi tuchis she doesn’t sense the real danger of the situation. After the painful stabs subside, mother and daughter don’t bother to seek medical help, they trot on over to a movie house showing Wild Strawberries, during which, while Joanne’s snoozing, mother dies. Certainly sounds serious and many people took the Jewish soaper as serious drama, having nominated both actresses for Oscars and Woodward won a few critics’ circles citations, but it must have been the fear of embarrassment many more viewers might have felt to keep them from bursting into riotous screams. (At home, watching it on TCM, you can really let it rip.) Though director Gilbert Cates is directing as if he’s saying something worth listening to, and Woodward never fails to oblige him, the harder they try the funnier things get: at the burial site long pent-up family hostilities erupt and in the barn on the family farm Woodward’s own daughter (Dori Brenner) hurls invective about her mother’s lengthy inconsiderations and all you can think about during these drama class scenes is how Carol Burnett could create another classic spoof in the tradition of Mildred Fierce. In José Eber hair, Woodward’s unhappy housewife is a shlemiel soaked in regret about her own failings, her husband’s distance, her daughter’s fattiness, her son’s absence. (He shows up in a blurry nightmare in which he appears to be taunting her with his ballet cavalier lover.) But I didn’t detect much regret in her for not trying harder to save her mother—maybe because she secretly had had it with their weekly lunches of broiled chicken and Ingmar Bergman matinees and the old hag’s cig addiction? At the end, after Woodward and husband Martin Balsam have convenient cathartic cleansings (hers in London, his in Bastogne), she becomes more tolerant—and practical: she tells her hubbie she wants them to move from their spacious apartment into a smaller one. Judging by his apparent habits, she’ll be spending a lot of lonely nights in the new place wrapped in her mink. More fatal will be the move as sufficient cause for her clique to strip her of her Jewish princessness for violating the unwritten canon—becoming a moishe kapoyr on an economy kick. It’s been more than forty years since I’ve seen Rachel, Rachel and when I saw it scheduled on TCM during its annual 31 days of Oscar, I decided to give it another go out of respect to the talents of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Remembered only 3 bits: James Olson having laid Woodward, Estelle Parsons kissing her, and the fantasy of pills being pushed into the mouth of the old hag of a mother. This last scene had the most impact because anytime it came up in one discussion or another about Woodward’s career, I’d chuckle about it. And because I provide home care to a close family member who has suffered a debilitating stroke, Woodward’s flash of revenge comes to mind when my charge gets particularly petulant. Watching the moment again, I found it more clumsy than funny, Newman having missed the opportunity for real humor, but over all pardonable. What’s not is the dreariness, a pilot for a late 60s Six Feet Under. Throughout I couldn’t understand why the moldy depressing material was worthy of attracting the likes of these major stars, but when looking back at their movie choices, the Newmans have been frequent suckers for dour middle-classness. Whether intentional or accidental, they’ve sometimes boxed themselves in with self-imposed “little people” limitations. The scariest part is their sincerity. Text COPYRIGHT © 2007 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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