Word: gilford
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Three stories illustrate the lives of the poor in czarist Russia. In Chelm, some imbecilic peasants play tricks on the village naif (Jack Gilford). For sage advice the victim consults the local, and unfunny, rabbi: "Why is the sea salty?" "Because of the herrings who live in it.'' In The Bandit, Gilford plays Aleichem himself, terrified by a thief, then retelling his role, à la Falstaff, as heroic. In The High School, the longest and most didactic episode, Gilford plays a domineering and ignorant father whose son is anxious to leave the ghetto for the new century. Between...
...Gilford is ideally cast; he appears to have been drawn by Maurice Sendak for the occasion, and he can suggest an entire shtetl with a shrug. But, save for the narrator (Joe Silver), he is supported by performers who believe that Yiddishkeit is suggested by saying already every two minutes. Nor is he aided by Director Milton Moss's attempts to create crowd scenes by bunching his cast in clumps. Doubtless the profit motive made the producers wheel a pushcart show to the Broadway stage. They might have recalled another Yiddish proverb: The longest road is the one that...
...manicured silver mane crowns Jack Gilford's head, but he tugs an imaginary forelock to his hit playwright wife. As for Joyce Van Patten, endlessly dutiful homemaker to a fabulous screen idol, she scoops up her lines with the hilariously harried rush of a mother on a late laundry...
...biblical story. The premise of the movie is that a second baby, Herschel, was set adrift on the Nile at the same time as Moses. Never mind the hieroglyphic plot; just consider a cast that includes John Houseman, Madeline Kahn, John Ritter, Laraine Newman, James Coco, Jack Gilford, Dom DeLuise and Jack Albertson, along with Richard Pryor in a robes-and-rigamarole cameo as the pharaoh who puts Herschel down. Pryor became ill on the set, and no wonder. Maybe even the actors don't want to look at this movie's bullrushes...