Publications
Andrew Spicer, University of the West of England:
‘Producing the Goods: Michael Klinger, Britain’s Forgotten
Jewish Mogul’
• Paper Given
at Davar (The Jewish Institute in Bristol and the South West), Gloucester
Road, Bristol, 8 March 2011
Introduction
- Thanks to Joav on behalf of Davar for the opportunity to talk about
‘The Jewish Producer: Michael Klinger and
Rachel’s Man’ which I’ve been
looking forward to eagerly but with a certain trepidation because of the
subject matter. I need to set the talk briefly into its context which
is that it forms part of my current research project. Two year AHRC-funded
Research Grant of c. £195,000 that started on 1 Feb. 2010 and will
finish on 31 Jan. 2012. So we’re just over mid-way, with a conference
on the producer in Bristol in April (sheet). My Research Associate, Dr
Anthony McKenna, has now completed the catalogue
that will go public at the end of this month. We will add to this gradually
with interviews and selected documents so that it becomes not just a catalogue
but a scholarly resource. Although, as I say on the summary, it contains
rich material - extensive correspondence, production files, contracts,
distribution rights, and company profit and loss accounts, the Klinger
Papers are incomplete. There is nothing on Klinger’s earlier career,
including his two films with Roman Polanski.
No files on Get Carter,
and gross imbalances: comprehensive material on some films, almost nothing
on others. Michael Klinger’s son, Tony has told me, on several occasions,
that he rescued the material from a bonfire that his mother had started
after his father’s death in 1989 that had been burning for two days
before he arrived. But why did Mrs Klinger start with the Get
Carter files?! Be that as it may, what we have
is a substantial resource, not only to catalogue but to interpret, moving
towards the authoritative account of Michael Klinger’s career to
be published by I.B. Tauris in the ‘Cinema
and Society’ series. This study of Klinger
is part of a larger project on the role of the film producer in British
cinema that I explored previously through my work on Sydney
Box (MUP, 2006), which, I’m happy to say
is due out in paperback in April, so retailing for £15.00 instead
of £47.50!
-Thus today’s talk is very much, as you’ll appreciate, work-in-progress
and is not intended to be comprehensive, but to raise some issues and,
hopefully, to arouse interest in this important but neglected figure and
to stimulate discussion. I’ll begin with a very brief overview of
Michael Klinger’s career, before focusing on one particular aspect:
Klinger as a Jewish producer. I do so for 3 reasons:
• Michael Klinger’s
son, Tony, who has kindly loaned his father’s papers to UWE, stressed
that the key to understanding his father was his Jewishness
• I want to
demonstrate the importance of the archive in being able to get at issues
that would otherwise be invisible or lost; ones that cannot be derived
from analysing Rachel’s Man
(1976), however attentive one might be.
• I wish to
raise some more general issues about the Jewish entrepreneur in the British
entertainment industries which have not, to my knowledge, been broached
before
An alternative focus would have been the Jewish war epic that never was,
Green Beach, that Michael
Klinger failed to produce over a 20 year period (1967-87). But I’ve
written about this elsewhere - in the New Review
of Film and Television Studies and as this was
an unproduced film - there’s no visual material, always fatal for
a talk, I’ve found. I have, as you’ll see, an abundance of
visual material for Rachel’s Man,
a selection of brief extracts from the film and also some high-definition
slides made from production stills from the film that are in the archive.
Career
So: who was Michael Klinger. As you can see from the first slide he’s
a showman, a film producer not aversed to blowing his own trumpet. Klinger
News was designed for the trade: to tell distributors,
agents and potential investors just what a dynamic and resourceful chap
he was. About 4 editions came out, as far as I can tell, when Klinger
was at the height of his powers in the mid-1970s. He’d just made
the highly profitable Gold
and was looking to promote himself as the leading British independent
producer.
As Michael Klinger is a ‘lost’ figure, I’ll sketch out
his career very briefly. The son of Polish Jewish immigrants who had settled
in London’s West End, Klinger’s entry into the film industry
came via his ownership of two Soho strip clubs, the Nell
Gwynn and the Gargoyle
- that were used for promotional events such as the Miss
Cinema competition and by film impresarios such
as James Carreras
- and through an alliance with a fellow Jewish entrepreneur Tony
Tenser. In October 1960 they set up Compton
Films which owned the Compton
Cinema Club, that showed, to anyone over twenty-one,
nudist and other uncertificated, often foreign, films, Compton
Film Distributors and Compton-Tekli
productions. The initial fare was low-brow sexploitation and genre films
but the two Roman Polanski
films, Repulsion (1965)
and Cul-de-sac (1966),
fired Klinger’s cultural ambitions and led to the break-up of the
partnership in October 1966. When Klinger set up a new company,
Avton Films, he continued to promote young,
talented but unproven directors capable of making fresh and challenging
features: Peter Collinson’s
absurdist/surrealist thriller The Penthouse
(1967); Alastair Reid’s
Baby Love (1968), another
film that focused on a sexually precocious young female, but with an ambitious
narrative style that included flashbacks and nightmare sequences.
The key to Klinger’s success in the 1970's was his ability to tap
into various markets: he continued to make low-budget sexploitation films
with the “Confessions”
series (Window Cleaner/Pop Performer/Driving Instructor/Holiday
Camp, 1974-78) for which he acted as executive
producer; medium budget thrillers including Mike
Hodges’s ambitious and brutal thriller
Get Carter (1971) and
the parodic follow-up, Hodges’ Pulp
(1972) - But his main energies were big-budget action-adventure films
- Gold (1974) and Shout
at the Devil (1976) - aimed at the international
market, which Klinger saw as the route to survival for the British film
industry. However, he could no longer rely, as he had done for Get
Carter and Pulp,
on American finance and had to go to South African financiers for money
before trying to negotiate a distribution deal. It is within this precarious,
fraught context that Rachel’s Man
has its idiosyncratic place.
Section 2: Rachel’s Man (1976)
Rachel’s Man is
a curiosity, a Biblical love story filmed in Israel shortly after the
Yom Kippur war in 1973, starring Mickey Rooney!
Why on earth is Klinger, at the most commercially successful point in
his career, making such a film?! It doesn’t seem to fit my conceptual
framework of someone adroitly constructing a varied portfolio of projects
to sustain a career in turbulent times. But oddities, of course, are important
precisely because they throw into relief a range of issues that otherwise
remain implicit or hidden, in this case Klinger’s Jewishness. There
is extensive material on the film in the archive, but I’ve also
recently completed an interview with the film’s director Moshe
Mizrahi, now living in Tel Aviv, no longer making
movies, but working part-time at the University there. Unfortunately,
my research budget wouldn’t stretch to a flight out, so the interview
was by telephone and e-mail. I also interviewed Tony Klinger who was production
manager. But first a taste of the film.
(a clip of the film is shown to the talk's audience)
That was a brief look at what is a ‘lost’ film, not even mentioned
in books on Biblical films or in studies of Israeli cinema. You can obtain
it on DVD, but that version has been cut down from 115 to 92 minutes;
the longer version only exists on a deleted VHS tape that I managed to
get on e-bay. What has been excised, unsurprisingly perhaps, is several
of the slower moving and more lyrical moments, which compromises the artistry
of the film and also gives less emphasis to Rachel’s complex feelings
of resentment and bitterness.
Conception
The first thing to say is that this is an Israeli film and was designed
partly to support the nascent Israeli film industry and the precarious
Israeli state. Klinger knew that he could obtain finance from the Israeli
Film Center if the film qualified: an original script, an Israeli writer,
and shot in Israel. It was also a project in which he could unite a Zionist
sentiment and an appeal to the wealthy South African Jewish businessmen
who had funded Gold. It’s worth mentioning that Klinger never obtained
any production finance from British sources, so in this sense, Rachel’s
Man is, in fact, typical. Klinger wrote to his
South African ‘associates’ that Rachel’s
Man was an ‘important project’ whose
production will ‘advance our national film industry and the development
of the cinematic art in Israel ... a terrific vehicle for helping Israel
and God knows she needs all the help she can get’. Klinger is hustling,
as ever, but not in order to make a quick profit, rather, as he sees it,
fulfilling a diasporic duty to the Jewish homeland.
Rachel’s Man also
fits Klinger’s consistent commitment to up and coming directors.
Klinger was impressed by Mizrahi’s previous films: The
House on Chelouche Street (1972) set against
the tensions during the period of the British mandate, an autobiographical
tale of the conflicting pressures on a young man growing up, including
a tender love story between him and an older, educated and independent
woman; Daughters, Daughters
(1973), a satire of male chauvinism about a prosperous man with eight
daughters, the youngest of whom is independent and determined to go her
own way; and I Love You Rosa
(1974) that explores the results of the legal requirement that a widow
must marry her husband's brother. He was also impressed by the awards
they’d garnered: two Oscar nominations and two official entries
at Cannes. He wanted to work with Israel’s best and most high profile
director.
From the material in the archive - which documents the process of making
the film rather than its genesis - I had rather assumed that the choice
of topic, a Biblical love story, was Mizrahi’s. I think I was guilty
of slipping into the auteur-director convention: Rachel’s
Man was Mizrahi’s ‘vision’.
However, what became crystal clear from the interview with Mizrahi was
that the conception was entirely Klinger’s: ‘He thought that
I had a special talent to tell unusual love stories’, Mizrahi recalled
and that Klinger had urged Mizrahi to tackle the oldest and greatest love
story, the story of Jacob and Rachel. Mizrahi recollected his surprise
at this ‘romantic side’ to Klinger, and also that Klinger
was prepared to pursue this conception over two years from their first
meeting at Cannes in March 1972 through to the completion of the screenplay
in spring 1974. Klinger summarily rejected Mizrahi’s thriller, Quietus,
a completed screenplay and a much more obviously box-office proposition.
However, Klinger, as befitted his status and self-conception, wanted an
international production so filming was to be in English with a British
principal crew including John Mitchell
as sound recordist and Ousama Rawi
as cinematographer, both of whom had worked on Gold.
Mizrahi was responsible for assembling the supporting actors and the general
crew members, Klinger the international stars: Leonard
Whiting (Zeffirelli’s Romeo)
as Jacob; Rita Tushingham
as Leah, Rachel’s sister, and Mickey Rooney
as Laban - Rooney had starred in Pulp
(1972). Rachel was to be played by the Israeli actress Michal
Bat-Adam, Mizrahi’s partner, who had taken
the lead role in his three previous films.
Scripting and Production
However, although Mizrahi falls in with Klinger’s wishes, two things
start to destabilise the production. The first is that there appears to
have been little discussion of the script. Mizrahi wrote, initially at
least, in French and Klinger is preoccupied first with post-production
work on Gold and then
with the organisation of his largest and most expensive film, Shout
at the Devil. These projects demanded most of
his attention and occasioned extended periods in Africa.
We do have a script that has some annotations and several deletions, but
although it’s undated, my impression is that this is a final script
that Klinger is then trying, slightly desperately, to shape. So he’s
deleting and making comments on using cuts rather than inserts, a quick
fix, but there is no sense that he is engaged in a dialogue with Mizrahi
and his co-writer Rachel Fabien
in order for them to re-write. It was too late in the day. Thus, although
the idea is Klinger’s, the conception and execution becomes, indisputably,
Mizrahi’s. As his thinking developed, Mizrahi had decided that he
did not want to make a straightforward adaptation of the Biblical story,
but to reinterpret it. As he recalled in interview:
I said to myself: why couldn’t I replace the
Jacob and Rachel story in the context of the underlying mythological
content that exists in Genesis. I remembered Robert
Graves’s postulation in
The White Goddess that the name 'Israel',
that was given to Jacob after his fight with the angel at the crossing
of the Yabbok River, came from 'Ish Rahel',
the Hebrew words for 'Rachel's Man'.
A practice, common to the old matriarchal religions of the Middle East,
was to give a new name to the man who marries the woman representing
the Goddess. At that moment I had a 'poetic'
title for the story. I became convinced that I could then try to film
not only the love story but build a new narrative and an original way
to treat the Genesis story. I wanted to give a new meaning
to the story and avoid the monotheistic narrative that after all evolved
much later with Moses, who founded what was to be the Jewish religion
as we know it today.
Thus part of Mizrahi’s conception was to eschew
the formulaic action-epic Hollywood treatment of the Bible The
Ten Commandments or Moses
the Lawgiver, a television mini-series starring
Burt Lancaster released
just before Rachel’s Man,
with its emphasis on patrilineal masculine heroism. In Hollywood’s
conventional gender politics, women are temptresses: Samson
and Delilah, David and
Bathsheba. Mizrahi’s feminist conception,
deeply congruent with his earlier films, also necessitated a particular
visual style - as we saw - avoiding the ‘desert cliché of
the Biblical films’, by representing ‘a new visual conception
more in accord to [sic] a vision of a “Land of milk and honey”
... I needed virgin landscapes without agriculture, modern buildings,
or electrical pylons ... I needed mountains, trees, running waters, and
springs. I chose to look for them in the Golan Heights and Upper Galilee.’
Thus there are two problems here. The first is the mismatch between Mizrahi’s
overtly intellectual, art house conception of the film which is at odds
with its internationalism and, to a degree with Klinger’s romantic
love story. This is not, I hasten to add, a question of the artistic director
versus the Philistine producer. Klinger, as mentioned, had sought out
Mizrahi as a talented director who might, like Polanski, win him an award
at Cannes or Berlin. As Tony Klinger remarked in interview, his father
loved the ‘café society’ that the cosmopolitan Mizrahi,
Egyptian-born and living in Paris, represented. It was that at this point
in his career, Michael Klinger is an international producer, and has to
be seen as such.
The second problem is that in addition to choosing inaccessible locations
in which it was difficult to film, the Golan Heights, of course, had been
a war zone until quite recently and was still a very dangerous place.
Tony Klinger, who was temporarily in charge of on location production
before his father arrived from Africa recalled the dangers vividly in
interview, as did John Mitchell in his memoirs: avoiding roads that may
still be mined, the interruptions to the shoot by low flying Mirage fighters
and even the possibility of the production being attacked by Syrian forces!
Klinger’s security bill for the production was colossal. The Israeli
crew was inexperienced and, despite wishing to aid Israel, Klinger found
himself exploited as a wealthy overseas businessman. Mitchell recalled
that Klinger became ‘obsessed with the sharp practices and shady
deals he was getting from the Israelis which drew the complaint: “I
wouldn’t mind so much if they were gentiles who were taking me for
a ride - but they are my own people”’.
After Rachel’s Man
was completed, Klinger became incensed when the Israeli Film Committee
only placed it in the middle category of films that receive special benefits
from their income in Israel while Diamonds,
the Golan and Globus
crime thriller, had been placed in the top category. Klinger wrote to
Ze’ev Birger the head of the Israeli Film Center: ‘I must
say that the grading between these two films is quite ludicrous and is
an insult to the most important directing talent to have come out of Israel,
namely Mizrahi. Furthermore, it does not encourage me as an overseas producer
to be concerned about further production in Israel.’ Klinger went
on to argue that the purpose of such grading is usually to encourage ‘those
films which do not have the same obvious commercial possibilities as others.
In other words it is an attempt to encourage the more artistic type of
product. There is no doubt that Diamonds
is a straightforward, good, commercial picture. Rachel’s
Man is quite clearly a highly artistic and individual
kind of picture and is exactly the sort of film which should get the maximum
encouragement.’
Post-Production, Distribution and Reception
Throughout its gestation, RM’s costs escalated; what was to have
been a modestly budgeted film gradually became an expensive one, rising
from £72,000 to £254,417. The original estimate, by Mizrahi,
was never realistic and Klinger knew this. However, because he was so
keen to make the film, Tony Klinger describes his father as being almost
wilfully blind to the economics of the production, stressing in his interview
that they did not apply the same commercial logic to Rachel’s
Man as to their usual productions. Indeed, at
one point in his correspondence, Klinger describes Rachel’s
Man as a labour of love. Hence the budget was
never really under control, nor was the film costed in a way that took
cognisance of its probable box office returns. Mizrahi’s original
estimate, for instance, took no account of the cost of the international
cast, always part of the equation for Michael Klinger.
The substantial cost - rising with indirect costs to over £400,000
- left Klinger with a dilemma as to how to distribute and market the film
that was in essence an art house film but one whose costs had to be recouped
through mainstream exposure. As with his earlier 1970s films, Klinger
tried to interest the big American studios - Warner
Bros, Universal
and Columbia but the
reaction of the Jewish executive David A. Matalon
at Columbia - which
was financing and distributing the ‘Confessions’
series) - was representative. He declined to distribute the film ‘even
at a reduced fee’ because his brother in Tel Aviv felt it was too
risky commercially even for Israel itself and therefore he cannot accept
minimum guarantees. Eventually Allied Artists
agreed a distribution deal but it is clear that they did so because they
had handled Gold profitably
and expected to distribute Shout at the Devil,
already in production which they could see as a much more straightforward
commercial proposition. Allied Artists’
attitude was mirrored by the UK distributors Hemdale:
which took on Rachel’s Man
in order to secure Klinger’s more commercial films.
Klinger complained repeatedly about both companies’ insensitivity
and ham-fisted handling of Rachel’s Man, lacking the ‘special
type of promotion’ he felt the film needed, and deserved. He also
became irritated by Rachel’s Man’s
inept promotion by both his overseas sales agent Paul
Kitzer and his European one Alain
Katz, noting that if the latter ‘wants
to handle my big pictures he has to bust his gut a little bit on the more
difficult ones … We have an important investment at stake in Rachel’s
Man by people who will continue to invest provided
we make our best efforts.’ Throughout, MK insisted that he has ‘faith
and confidence in this beautiful film and distributors have often been
wrong before. I think if the public gets to see it they will love it,
and we must take a very strong line with our customers who want Shout
at the Devil, Green Beach,
Eagle in the Sky etc.
and they just have to buy this picture.’ Unfortunately the ‘strong
line’ cut no ice with overseas exhibitors, many of whom declined
to screen it. Joe Sando,
the head of Ster Films
in Jo’burg, was prepared to make the effort because of South Africa’s
extensive Jewish population. But he wrote to Klinger:
As you can see, [the reviews] were not very good, and even though we
went flat out to promote the film with Jewish organisations, special
previews, etc., the initial result has been very disappointing.
We will obviously suffer a very considerable financial loss. I really
do not know how this problem can be overcome but we are contemplating
to repeat the film in smaller houses - perhaps you can
come up with some suggestions. Even at special screenings for Jewish
community leaders the film was unfortunately not well received. They
found the film slow in the main.
Despite arguing that Rachel’s
Man would be a ‘good film for raising
money for Israel’, Klinger did not have much success in rallying
British Jewish organisations to support the film. Again, the reaction
at special premiers was lukewarm. Klinger had also delayed releasing RM
because he hoped it would be showcased as Cannes, but was frustrated by
the Israeli government’s decision not to put Rachel’s
Man forward as its official entry because Mizrahi’s
last film, Daughters, Daughters,
had been selected the previous year.
Thus Rachel’s Man
limped out on release in Spring 1976 with little publicity or promotion
and generally received dismal reviews. They were not necessarily unperceptive
- there was some recognition of what Mizrahi was trying to achieve. Patrick
Gibbs in the DT thought Rachel’s
Man was ‘at least original in attempting
an Old Testament story on an intimate rather than epic scale’ and
some reviewers picked up on its use of Graves’s mythology. But even
those who were vaguely sympathetic considered Rachel’s
Man to be uneven, the dialogue occasionally
inept, that it hovered uneasily between an overt allegory and a realistic,
intimate portrait of a love story. There was more-or-less unanimity that
it was disastrously slow-moving: ‘lumbering’ and ‘leaden’
being favoured adjectives.
Mizrahi's own retrospective judgement is shrewd:
...an unusual film and perhaps ahead of its time.
I also think that perhaps there were too many things in it, and that
each one of them, could, if developed, sustain a whole film. One, the
poetic and
romantic love story. Then, the mythological story that replaces the
Bible narrative and baffled the audience. Finally the unusual situation
comedy that arises from the tribulations of Jacob, torn
between his four women and the wiles of Laban. I also think, that despite
the brilliant performances of the cast, the English language of the
film and the different origins of the cast didn't give to the
film a unity [in] the dialogue.
Mizrahi recalled that Klinger was ‘very much
surprised when we screened the final cut of the film. I understood that
this was not the film he expected. But I also must say that he didn't
interfere at all with the result.’ However, if Klinger was, as his
son avers, bitterly disappointed by Rachel’s
Man, he never expressed this to anyone and remained
intensely loyal. I believe that he felt that he had tried, honourably,
to do his bit for Israel and its film industry, that he had championed
an exciting talent, and that Rachel’s Man
was an unfortunate, and expensive, failure. Tony Klinger, who seems to
have been quite badly scarred by Rachel’s
Man, feels it was a strangely nightmarish way
of making a substantial donation to a Jewish charity!
Conclusion: the Jewish entrepreneur
I hope that the story of Rachel’s Man
was of interest. Although, as I’ve shown, its production tells us
many things about the nature of the British and Israeli film industries,
and about domestic and international distribution and exhibition during
this period, its provocation to me as a researcher was how to explain
its place within Klinger’s oeuvre. It’s a curiosity to be
sure, and a failure, but it was part of Klinger’s sense of himself
as an international rather than solely British independent producer, a
champion of directorial talent and above all as a Jewish film-maker, aiding
the cause of the beleaguered homeland.
This analysis of Klinger’s Jewishness has become part of a wider
project investigating the role of Jewish producers in the British film
industry that would encompass, to name some of the obvious ones.
Michael Balcon at
Gainsborough and Ealing;
Sidney Bernstein and
the Granada chain of
cinemas and television franchise; Nat Cohen
and Stuart Levy who
set up Anglo-Amalgamated
in 1942; after Levy's death in 1966, Cohen went on to become head of Anglo-EMI;
Oscar Deutsch who
established the Odeon cinema chain - his son David
Deutsch became a producer; Yoram
Globus & Menahem
Golan and their Cannon
Film Group; Lew Grade
and his brother Bernard Delfont
whose reach extended from television and light entertainment into film
in the 1970s and 1980s; Phil
and Syd Hyam,
former cinema owners who ran the production-distribution outfit Eros
Films; Alexander Korda,
a Hungarian Jew who set up London Films in 1932; the Ostrer
brothers who founded Gaumont
British Picture Corporation in 1927, known in
the trade as ‘Gaumont-Yiddish’;
Tony Tenser, Klinger’s
former partner who went on to be head of Tigon
Films; C.M. Woolf
in film distribution and his sons John and
James who founded Romulus Films.
Although one cannot, in my view, construct a British equivalent to Neal
Gabler’s famous study of the Jewish dominance
of Hollywood, An Empire of Their Own,
the persons mentioned, together with Klinger, of course, had, individually
and collectively, a major impact on the development of British cinema.
Of course, I can’t attempt to trace that impact now, but just raise
the key question: why are Jews drawn to the financial rather than the
straightforwardly ‘creative’ roles (obviously the director)?
[John Schlesinger;
Michael Winner] How
does this accord with certain historic and deep-seated conceptions of
Jewish entrepreneurialism? I remember asking Tony Klinger if his father
ever aspired to be a director. He looked surprised. ‘He wanted to
be the guy who wrote the cheques’, was his response.
Of course, this is difficult territory for dispassionate discussion because
the pejorative stereotype of Jews as the archetypal greedy usurer, a stereotype
with deep historical roots, is so entrenched in many cultures, as Abraham
Foxman, Director of the Anti-Defamation
League, has discussed at length in his recent
study, Jews and Money
(2010). Famous British examples would include Shylock
in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice,
or Dickens’ Fagin
in Oliver Twist. In
Jews and Money: The Myths and the Reality
Gerald Krefetz argues
that the Jews’ historical experience predisposed them to ‘independence
and self-sufficiency since they usually lived in a hostile or indifferent
society’ and thus they were drawn to ‘progressive industries
where innovation was rewarded’ and rapid expansion possible (11-12).
This experience generated an ‘entrepreneurial spirit and tradition
of risk-taking [that] has led [Jews] into the peripheral, marginal, creative,
and novel areas of existence’. The film industry would therefore
be highly attractive.
Jerry Z. Muller, in Capitalism and the Jews, identifies them as a ‘diasporic
merchant minority’ (7) with a predisposition towards the ‘rationalistic
and calculative mentality so characteristic of capitalism’ (58).
Muller argues that their social exclusion and diasporic circumstances
are the key factors in accounting for why Jews have tended to be drawn
to the financial and commercial rather than the bureaucratic or industrial
aspects of capitalist economies (53, 77) even as this made them parasitic
in popular prejudice (61). This predisposition worked well for Jews in
America, but created deep resentment in hierarchical, class-bound cultures
such as Britain where they were stigmatised as pushy and aggressive parvenus.
But as the Mirror Group owner Cecil King
(1901-87) observed, without a public school education or powerful social
connections they had no pull, only push (Aris: 10). Understandably, Jewish
community networking was correspondingly strong. As Stephen
Aris remarks pithily in his British-based study
The Jews in Business,
‘Jews preferred to do business with other Jews’.
In his study of British Jewry, Geoffrey Alderman
observes that the Jewish workers’ outlook ‘differed fundamentally
from the British craft tradition; they saw themselves ... as potentially
upwardly mobile, not as perpetual members of the proletariat’ (184).
Aris argues that their energy and dynamism had a profound effect on the
development of British commercial life, driving force in the revolutionary
consumer boom of late Victorian England that, in the course of two generations,
established the ‘whole machinery for feeding, clothing and entertaining
the increasingly prosperous working class’.
Thus we need to place Jewish involvement in the British film industry
within this wider context. And we also need to see Klinger’s desire
to help the Israeli film industry as part of a longer history of Zionism,
an international movement that sought, from the mid-1880s, to engineer
the return of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland, the Land of
Israel, encouraging Jews to define themselves as a nation seeking its
own sovereignty and ending the near two millennia of exile. Sidney
Bernstein, for instance, was prominent in the
Jewish Israel Association,
and Jewish organisations such as the long-established Jewish
National Fund, were particularly active during
the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 (Bermant: 113-15). These broader contexts
remind us, if we need reminding, that we cannot understand a film such
as Rachel’s Man
outside of these wider historical processes.
Rachel’s Man (1976) - Synopsis
[From Distributor’s ‘Fact Sheet’: Rachel’s
Man is first and foremost a powerful love story.
The two young lovers - Rachel (Michal Bat-Adam)
and Jacob (Leonard Whiting)
- happen to step out from the pages of the Bible, but this in no way diminishes
the drama, the sensuousness, the tenderness, the emotional violence and
the frustrations of their relationship. It is the first love story ever
told, and it has never been bettered.]
An unnamed narrator informs us that Isaac’s wife Rebecca eventually
bore twins, Jacob and Esau. Because Jacob follows Esau from the womb,
clutching at his brother’s foot, Rebecca names him: ‘the one
of the sacred heel’. Encouraged by Rebecca, Jacob fools the blind
Isaac into giving him the blessing intended for the first-born. Jacob
has to flee from Esau who has sworn to kill him for his treachery.
Journeying to the land of Rebecca’s brother Laban, Jacob encounters
the Cainites, who with their third eye see into the future, and witnesses
a young man made lame in a ritual ceremony. He falls asleep near a waterfall
and is found by Rachel who reveals that she is his cousin and names him
Ish-Rahel - Rachel’s
Man. Her father Laban is bitterly disappointed
that Jacob has arrived penniless but is warned by his household gods that
he must not harm Jacob who has a gift that causes everything he touches
to prosper and multiply.
Jacob and Rachel have fallen in love and although she would rather go
away with him, Jacob asks Laban for her hand in marriage. Laban strikes
a bargain that if Jacob works for him for seven years, his payment will
be Rachel. Rachel warns Jacob of her father’s dishonesty and that
it is the custom to have the bride heavily veiled and to consummate the
marriage in darkest night. The couple devise a secret sign whereby Jacob
will know it is Rachel on the wedding night.
However, when Jacob wakes on the morning after the wedding night, it is
Leah, Rachel’s sister, who lies beside him. Jacob, feeling bitter
and betrayed, runs away. Laban goes after him and persuades him that he
could not marry the younger sister before the elder and that if he works
another seven years, he can have Rachel. Rachel reveals to Jacob that
she told Leah of the secret sign in order to save her from embarrassment.
Leah bears Jacob four sons, but his relationship with Rachel remains childless.
Rachel give Jacob her bondmaiden, Bilha, who bears him two sons. The jealous
Leah gives him her bondmaiden, Zilpah, who bears him two further sons.
Jacob agrees to a work seven years more for Laban, provided that he has
half his herd, those which are spotted or black. Jacob’s herds prosper.
The sisters are reconciled and Rachel bears Jacob a son, Joseph.
After 21 years working for Laban, Jacob sees his mother in a dream and
knows he must return home. Jacob crosses the River Yabbok and is attacked
by a giant stranger who dislocates his hip joint in a violent struggle.
Jacob now walks with a limp, his heel never touching the ground. As his
life completes a circle, ‘he of the sacred heel’ is now Israel,
Ish-Rahel, Rachel’s
Man. All the kings of Israel will have the same
sacred limp as do pagan heroes sacred to the Mother Goddess.
Rachel is pregnant again and Jacob stops the caravan at Ephrat (later
Bethlehem). Rachel gives birth to another boy, Benjamin, but dies. Jacob
buries her at the cross-roads, piling stones on her tomb in a conical-shaped
pillar.
The unnamed narrator relates that Joseph’s life will be stranger
than Jacob’s, but that is another story ...
[Only 1 review on Internet Movie Database:
An attempt to portray Jacob in his quest for a wife fell flat on its rear
end. Whiting with his heavy and stiff English accent, while others spoke
more American English, was almost laughable. The plot was known, so not
much to go on there, however, the acting was terrible by all and would
not even rate a B movie acclaim. Don't waste you time on this one.]
Thank you.
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