Word: jacobi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...plot twists lurks the question of where ethnic solidarity begins and ends. Epstein, the funniest of the tales, focuses on that universal malady, middle age. Epstein's morale has drooped in exact ratio to the sag of his wife Goldie's breasts. In the title role, Lou Jacobi, who looks rather like a Levantine Walter Cronkite, is hilarious, wistful, bewildered and altogether human. Epstein has an affair with a sprightly widow. But, under Jehovah's unblinking eye, there is no sin without atonement...
There are flaws in the film: vignettes featuring Lou Jacobi as a past-throttled immigrant judge, Donald Sutherland as the pastor of the First Existentialist Church, and Alan Arkin as a neurotic police chief are all ill-timed. The first is prolonged to an ineffectively surreal note, the second (by far the funniest) turns into roundhouse farce, the last starts and ends hysterically...
Want to win a sure bet? Dare someone not to half-die laughing at Lou Jacobi in a slight but briskly burnished comic nugget of a play called Norman, Is That...
Sour cream wouldn't melt in Jacobi's mouth, and his face looks like a bowl of stale potato salad. But he wears his troubles like epaulettes, and has he got troubles. He is the owner of a Midwest dry-cleaning establishment, and his wife has just run off with his partner who happens to be his brother. Seeking solace from his New York bachelor son Norman (Martin Huston), Jacobi arrives unannounced (if anything Jacobi does can properly be called unannounced) and finds the boy nonchalantly involved in a homosexual liaison with a friend named Garson (Walter Willison...
...watch Jacobi try to pry this unorthodox couple apart, while simultaneously attempting to cope with the ideas of his wife's infidelity and his son's sexual apostasy, is the chief source of the evening's merriment. Jacobi's erring wife, played by Maureen Stapleton, arrives on the scene, is apprised of events, casts one horrified glance at the floozie Jacobi has imported for remedial therapy, closes her eyes, and bawls the show-stopping title line, "Norman, is that...