Jewish Film Festival Will Focus on the Light Side

Comedy is so powerful a force in Jewish life that the Yiddish language can be illustrated with jokes.

Yet when David Schwartz began putting together a program of Jewish American comedies for the Skirball Cultural Center’s first film festival, he was surprised to see how few there really were.

For decades, Jewish participation in the film industry tended not to be reflected directly on-screen. Movies about Andy Hardy were more likely to be green lighted by Jewish studio heads than ones about kids named Sammy, and “The Father of the Bride” didn’t know from a chuppah.

Even when a film had overt Jewish content, it tended to be diluted in some way, says Schwartz. He cites “They Won’t Forget,” Mervyn LeRoy’s 1937 film based on the real-life lynching of Leo Frank. While the accused remains Jewish in the film, the role based on his Jewish attorney does not.

That all began to change in the 1960s, which became a Golden Age of Jewish American comedy, in Schwartz’s view. How did it happen? Schwartz, who is chief curator at the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, thinks two trends converged in a way that led to some hilarious movies.

First, live TV and theater proved to be an ideal training ground for Jewish comic talents such as Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Carl Reiner. Second, the decline of the studio system spurred the production of relatively low-budget, independent films, some of them comedies. In this era of indies, filmmakers could, and did, take greater risks, including exploring their own Jewish American histories.

Schwartz cites the example of Carl Reiner, who will open the series Sunday afternoon. Reiner didn’t write explicitly Jewish material for “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” even though it grew out of his own life. But when Reiner made “Enter Laughing” in 1967, he filled it with references to his Jewish American childhood in the Bronx and his experiences as an aspiring New York actor. (Reiner will speak about the movie after it screens at 1:30 p.m.)

For the curator, one of the pleasures of putting the series together was discovering films for the first time. One gem, he says, was “Bye Bye Braverman,” a film by Sidney Lumet, a director rarely associated with comedy. The movie, which made George Segal a star, follows four intellectual, liberal friends around New York City as they try to find a fifth friend’s funeral.

Released in 1968, the year before “Easy Rider,” “Bye Bye Braverman” is a kind of “intellectual road movie,” says Schwartz. “It explores these characters and it explores ideas, and there aren’t too many movies like that.” (It will be screened Oct. 13.)

Naturally, Schwartz included work by the directors he names as Jewish American comedy’s Big Three--Brooks, Allen and Reiner. Released in 1968, Brooks’ immortal “The Producers” will be screened Oct. 20, allowing the audience to marvel yet again at the decidedly Jewish American sensibility that could create a musical number called “Springtime for Hitler” and manage to make it screamingly funny instead of unforgivably offensive.

Several of the 13 feature films were blockbusters, including Allen’s “Annie Hall,” which swept the 1977 Oscars. (It will be screened Oct. 27.) But a couple are downright obscure. One such is Michael Roemer’s “The Plot Against Harry,” about a small-time Jewish hood in New York Made in 1969, the movie wasn’t released until 1989: “It literally sat on a shelf for 20 years.”

The movie, which will be screened Oct. 17, has a near documentary feel (“it’s almost a time capsule”) as well as a multicultural orientation, unusual for its day. “I think it’s just one of the best American independent films,” Schwartz says. “It’s very beautifully observed, beautifully made.”

Also included is Roger Corman’s cult classic, the original “Little Shop of Horrors.” The 1960 movie was shot in two days, says Schwartz, and much of it was improvised. A good deal of the film’s Jewish American comedy was contributed by actor Mel Welles, who plays the flower-shop owner, Mushkin, with a broad Yiddish accent.

“A lot of the comedy,” Schwartz says, “comes from Yiddish expressions and traditional Jewish humor, which is surprising in the context of a low-budget horror movie.” Corman will speak after the screening Oct. 31.

Schwartz noticed that most of the comedies were set in New York. For the hometown audience, he looked hard for films set in Los Angeles. He found Joel Coen’s “Barton Fink” (1991). (The screening date will be announced.) “It’s one of the few films that takes a look at behind the scenes in Hollywood,” Schwartz notes. Set in the 1940s, not long after World War II, it’s a disturbing film. Jewish self-hatred, Schwartz adds, appears to be one of its themes.

“The film starts off comically but takes a very dark turn along the way,” says Schwartz, noting that it even makes surreal use of images associated with the Holocaust.

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DETAILS

* WHAT: American Jewish Comedy Film Festival.

* WHERE: Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd.

* WHEN: Sunday-Oct. 31. Films screen at 1:30 p.m. Sundays, 7:30 p.m. weekdays.

* HOW MUCH: $3-$12.

* CALL: (310) 440-4666 for information; (213) 466-1767 for tickets.