Word: yakov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Miss Brooks dislikes idle speechifying. While presiding over the U.N.'s agenda committee last week, she politely cut off Soviet Ambassador Yakov Malik in the middle of a routine procedural debate, ordered a vote on the matter and went on to new business. "The U.N. could and should remain the best means of international cooperation that has ever been at mankind's disposal," she says. Then, as though speaking of one of her children, she adds: "But we have to nurse and cherish and cultivate...
...Ambassadors Charles Yost of the U.S., Armand Bérard of France, Yakov Malik of the Soviet Union, and Lord Caradon of Britain gathered around the polished mahogany dining table in Bérard's Park Avenue flat...
...moved from pity to terror to catharsis. By those tenets, as valid as they are venerable, Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer Prize novel The Fixer misses greatness by a third. It has the first two requisites, but it omits any purge of the emotions. Malamud brings his hero, Yakov Bok, to the brink of destruction-or salvation-and freezes the action. There, in Auden's phrase, "the seas of pity lie, locked and frozen in each eye." By definition, the film of The Fixer can aspire to be only two-thirds of a great movie. Still, it has within...
...playing, Bok becomes a second Job who grows from suffering to manhood. The fixer finally fixes himself, and, symbolically, all sufferers. Like the book, the film has no end, only a conclusion: there is no such thing as indifference; an abstention from humanity is a vote for evil. When Yakov goes to trial the story halts, as if the future were epilogue. Unfortunately, it is not. Malamud based his novel on the agonies of a real Russian Jew, Mendel Beiliss, who was finally exonerated. Torn between actuality and false doom, The Fixer becomes a victim of artistic indecision...
Because the story has no conventional plot development, it is at its interior that the film shines. In the title role, Bates' indomitable intelligence radiates through the rough peasant vocabulary and makes Yakov too mortal...