Mamele

The joys of Yiddish cinema are served up to yet another generation in this beautifully restored print made for Mamele’s 75th anniversary. The film retains its sparkling mix of humor, song and predictable pathos, always slyly undercut by the marvelous Molly Picon. She was a Yiddish Mary Martin. Ten years after her triumph in the stage version, Picon was able to pull off the role of the put-upon “little mother” Havele, who waits hand and foot on her many siblings and perpetually unemployed father (Max Bozyk) and in her spare time acts as matchmaker and advice central for the entire tenement. Though unappreciated by all (but us), Havele is increasingly self-aware and her jokes and songs begin to crystallize the film’s overt portrayal of gender roles. One suspects that Mamele was quaint even in 1938, especially in the film version which is transposed in its setting from the stage play’s Lower East Side to Lodz, Poland, director Joseph’s Green’s home town. Only in retrospect does its picture of Jewish life in Poland between the wars—replete with tenements and fancy cars, gangsters and yeshiva boys, sukkahs and supper clubs—become priceless. The filmmakers finished the edit just in time to leave Warsaw for more hospitable ground, but even they couldn’t have known that they had created a relic of a lost world. California Premiere