Word: frankel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ballad of a Soldier (Mosfilm; Kingsley-Frankel). A Russian soldier scuttles like a desperate bug across an open field. Like a big grey toad, a German tank relentlessly pursues him. Bullets frisk about his heels. He dodges, drops his gun, falls, runs on, gasps, reels with exhaustion. The screen reels, tilts crazily, tilts further . . . Suddenly the image is upside down, the world is upside down. Yet still across a sky of mud the soldier flees, and still the tank pursues...
Earl Montgomery, as Doctor Stockmann, has much of the bearing of a "matinee idol," and appears much younger than his wife, admirably portrayed by Lois Holmes. Art Smith, as Morton Kiil, presents a striking portrait of her shrewd and disreputable father. Gene Frankel's direction is adept and certain touches are superb. Yet with the children, who add more distraction than depth, his direction is spotty and they generally dash onstage with a gust, then settle into the shadows to await their lines...
...five-hour walk among the city's "few central brick structures" and along the "muddy lanes" beyond, Yiddish-speaking Reporter Frankel "heard no more than four or five Yiddish conversations." He found Yiddish disappearing from the street signs, as it has already from the schools and the movies...
...There has been no significant influx of the Soviet Union's 2,500,000 Jews since World War II. The total population of an area twice the size of New Jersey is barely 160,000, "half Jewish, two-thirds urban." Young Jews leave to seek better opportunities elsewhere; Frankel met one in the train who spoke with "contempt" of the city of Birobidzhan (pop. 60,000) as "a city of three streets...
...visitor," wrote Frankel, "notes the absence of youngsters, at the movies and in the streets, even before he hears a sociological explanation for their exodus: they aspire to assimilation, to opportunity alongside the Russians. They might rebel against Yiddish culture even if it were sanctioned...