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Are you inventing again?
The last few days have reminded me that I never wrote about The Heart of New York (1932), one of the more singular pre-Code movies I have run into and I say this as someone who survived Wonder Bar (1934) and wish more people knew about Way Out West (1930). I watched it two or three years ago with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch when it came around on TCM; I can't remember if we knew it featured the comic team of Smith and Dale ("Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this!"–"So don't do that!") or if it just looked like an only-in-pre-Code curiosity that wouldn't take up much more than seventy minutes of our time. Either makes for a valid reason to watch the movie, but both of them really proceed from the reason I'm writing about it today. It's a classical Hollywood movie about a Jewish family that's not a social message picture. It's not about anti-Semitism; it's not a clash between assimilation and old-world tradition; it's not even an immigration story, since everyone starts out living on Hester Street. It's a comedy about a threadbare plumber with daydreams of grandeur whose life goes off the rails when one of his inventions actually works. Menakhem-Mendl of Kasrilevke, eat your heart out.
The experience is not unlike being hit with a spring-loaded can of Borscht Belt. David Freedman, author of the original Broadway play Mendel, Inc. (1929) and its source stories of Lower East Side luftmentsh Mendel Marantz and his hectic extended family, worked as a gag writer for vaudeville and radio before his untimely death in 1936 and hardly an exchange goes by in The Heart of New York that doesn't have a punch line you can hear the hi-hat at the end of. If a joke doesn't land, wait thirty seconds. If that one doesn't land either, don't worry, you won't remember by the end of the next round. George Sidney's Mendel is one of the less zany ingredients in this tsimmes and his dialogue is full of homespun Dada like "What are clothes? Freckles. They cover you, but they don't mean nothing" or "What's relations? Measles. You got to have them," although I think my favorite is his philosophical concession to matters of the heart: "What's love? A potato. It's got eyes, but it's blind." (His long-suffering wife Zelde is played by Anna Appel and she's heard this formula before. When Mendel begins expansively, "What is life? A seesaw. Today you are poor—" she cuts in with a sigh: "And tomorrow you're poorer.") Plot, what's a plot? An ailment at the doctor's. By the time you've described it, it's nowhere to be seen. Mendel invents a mechanical dishwasher, the profits take his family to Park Avenue, the swanky lifestyle almost breaks them up, his wealthy, Americanized partner double-crosses him, his prospective son-in-law does some fancy lawyering and saves the day, and everything ends in the old familiar chaos, just with a little more in the bank. Wise counsel is supplied by Aline MacMahon as the sympathetic young widow next door and the alternative comes wholesale—just don't ask where they got it—from Joe Smith and Charlie Dale as two of the biggest and least successful gonifs in Manhattan. Smith is Bernard Shnaps, a fast-talking wheeler-dealer whose double-sided business cards are crammed with small print to cover all contingencies from "silverware and underwear" to "steamship tickets, foreign exchange, and oranges" ("Mortgages! It's a terrible printer"); naturally he himself can neither read nor write and literally rubber-stamps every deal he makes. Dale is milder-mannered but just as hazardous as the amiably worried Sam Shtrudel, whose hard hearing comes and goes according to the laws of comedy; pushed to the limit of his nerves by his hustling partner, he freaks out like Gene Wilder, jumping and stamping his feet while shouting, "Please don't aggravate me, don't aggravate me! I got high blood pressure!" They are connected to Mendel by a complex chain of in-lawry that knots him into one of his predicaments and helps him out at the end, totally by accident both times. There are also some Marantz kids running around, a couple of them having romances and one of them having troubles with his teeth. Most of the surroundings are sets, but there are a few exterior tracking shots that look like the real streets of the Lower East Side, stalls and crowds and pushcarts everywhere. I hope to God the sign for Goldstein's Chop Suey Parlor was real. What did you people eat for the first thousand years?
There would be nothing unusual about this film if it were in Yiddish, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer or Joseph Green. But it's in English, and that means somebody at Warners thought there was a market for it, and that almost blows my mind. Its characters are broad, but they're not caricatures, and the jokes are affectionate and even nostalgic to schmaltz-point in places; the target audience is clearly Jewish. So's almost all of the cast. The eldest Marantz daughter is played by Ruth Hall and her suitor of all trades (Shnaps talked him up as a doctor, Shtrudel talked him up as a dentist, and Lilian is pretty sure she fell in love with a law student: "Zelde, that's what you call a bargain!") by Donald Cook, but otherwise George Sidney was born Sammy Greenfield in Hungary and came to Hollywood by way of vaudeville, which is why so many of his credits are on the Cohen side of The Cohens and the Kellys; Anna Appel was a Romanian-born veteran of New York's Yiddish Art Theatre, not to mention Yiddish cinema like Green Fields (גרינע פעלדער, 1937) and The Singing Blacksmith (יאנקל דער שמיד, 1938). Longtime vaudevillians Smith and Dale started life on the Lower East Side as Sultzer and Marks. Aline MacMahon didn't change her name from anything, matrilineality for the win. Director Mervyn LeRoy was Jewish. About the only concession to the idea that goyim might see this movie is the altered title, and considering how often "New York" functions as a euphemism-dogwhistle for "Jewish," I'm not sure how deracinated it was even at the time of release. There's no shortage of written Yiddish all over the screen. The accents are also a bit of a tell.
It's hard for me to say if this movie is any good. Like a lot of pre-Code, its reach exceeds its budget and the plot resolves like the director just realized the last reel was fluttering out fast; I suspect it's profoundly confusing if you have no affinity for the tropes of the culture depicted and it might be awkward even if you do, since I know that not everyone—including me—has an infinite tolerance for mothers who express love by hectoring and fathers who'd dream all day on the clock if you let them, never mind whether Sholem Aleichem wrote them first. I think the fairest thing to say about The Heart of New York is that it's a Yiddish comedy that just happens to be in English. I enjoyed watching it immensely and I suspect there are reasons I've never seen anything like it in the days of the Production Code. In the incomprehensible words of Bernard Shnaps: "If I'm not here, I'm there. If I'm not there, where am I? I'm here. And there you are." This venture brought to you by my inventive backers at Patreon.
spatch when it came around on TCM; I can't remember if we knew it featured the comic team of Smith and Dale ("Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this!"–"So don't do that!") or if it just looked like an only-in-pre-Code curiosity that wouldn't take up much more than seventy minutes of our time. Either makes for a valid reason to watch the movie, but both of them really proceed from the reason I'm writing about it today. It's a classical Hollywood movie about a Jewish family that's not a social message picture. It's not about anti-Semitism; it's not a clash between assimilation and old-world tradition; it's not even an immigration story, since everyone starts out living on Hester Street. It's a comedy about a threadbare plumber with daydreams of grandeur whose life goes off the rails when one of his inventions actually works. Menakhem-Mendl of Kasrilevke, eat your heart out.The experience is not unlike being hit with a spring-loaded can of Borscht Belt. David Freedman, author of the original Broadway play Mendel, Inc. (1929) and its source stories of Lower East Side luftmentsh Mendel Marantz and his hectic extended family, worked as a gag writer for vaudeville and radio before his untimely death in 1936 and hardly an exchange goes by in The Heart of New York that doesn't have a punch line you can hear the hi-hat at the end of. If a joke doesn't land, wait thirty seconds. If that one doesn't land either, don't worry, you won't remember by the end of the next round. George Sidney's Mendel is one of the less zany ingredients in this tsimmes and his dialogue is full of homespun Dada like "What are clothes? Freckles. They cover you, but they don't mean nothing" or "What's relations? Measles. You got to have them," although I think my favorite is his philosophical concession to matters of the heart: "What's love? A potato. It's got eyes, but it's blind." (His long-suffering wife Zelde is played by Anna Appel and she's heard this formula before. When Mendel begins expansively, "What is life? A seesaw. Today you are poor—" she cuts in with a sigh: "And tomorrow you're poorer.") Plot, what's a plot? An ailment at the doctor's. By the time you've described it, it's nowhere to be seen. Mendel invents a mechanical dishwasher, the profits take his family to Park Avenue, the swanky lifestyle almost breaks them up, his wealthy, Americanized partner double-crosses him, his prospective son-in-law does some fancy lawyering and saves the day, and everything ends in the old familiar chaos, just with a little more in the bank. Wise counsel is supplied by Aline MacMahon as the sympathetic young widow next door and the alternative comes wholesale—just don't ask where they got it—from Joe Smith and Charlie Dale as two of the biggest and least successful gonifs in Manhattan. Smith is Bernard Shnaps, a fast-talking wheeler-dealer whose double-sided business cards are crammed with small print to cover all contingencies from "silverware and underwear" to "steamship tickets, foreign exchange, and oranges" ("Mortgages! It's a terrible printer"); naturally he himself can neither read nor write and literally rubber-stamps every deal he makes. Dale is milder-mannered but just as hazardous as the amiably worried Sam Shtrudel, whose hard hearing comes and goes according to the laws of comedy; pushed to the limit of his nerves by his hustling partner, he freaks out like Gene Wilder, jumping and stamping his feet while shouting, "Please don't aggravate me, don't aggravate me! I got high blood pressure!" They are connected to Mendel by a complex chain of in-lawry that knots him into one of his predicaments and helps him out at the end, totally by accident both times. There are also some Marantz kids running around, a couple of them having romances and one of them having troubles with his teeth. Most of the surroundings are sets, but there are a few exterior tracking shots that look like the real streets of the Lower East Side, stalls and crowds and pushcarts everywhere. I hope to God the sign for Goldstein's Chop Suey Parlor was real. What did you people eat for the first thousand years?
There would be nothing unusual about this film if it were in Yiddish, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer or Joseph Green. But it's in English, and that means somebody at Warners thought there was a market for it, and that almost blows my mind. Its characters are broad, but they're not caricatures, and the jokes are affectionate and even nostalgic to schmaltz-point in places; the target audience is clearly Jewish. So's almost all of the cast. The eldest Marantz daughter is played by Ruth Hall and her suitor of all trades (Shnaps talked him up as a doctor, Shtrudel talked him up as a dentist, and Lilian is pretty sure she fell in love with a law student: "Zelde, that's what you call a bargain!") by Donald Cook, but otherwise George Sidney was born Sammy Greenfield in Hungary and came to Hollywood by way of vaudeville, which is why so many of his credits are on the Cohen side of The Cohens and the Kellys; Anna Appel was a Romanian-born veteran of New York's Yiddish Art Theatre, not to mention Yiddish cinema like Green Fields (גרינע פעלדער, 1937) and The Singing Blacksmith (יאנקל דער שמיד, 1938). Longtime vaudevillians Smith and Dale started life on the Lower East Side as Sultzer and Marks. Aline MacMahon didn't change her name from anything, matrilineality for the win. Director Mervyn LeRoy was Jewish. About the only concession to the idea that goyim might see this movie is the altered title, and considering how often "New York" functions as a euphemism-dogwhistle for "Jewish," I'm not sure how deracinated it was even at the time of release. There's no shortage of written Yiddish all over the screen. The accents are also a bit of a tell.
It's hard for me to say if this movie is any good. Like a lot of pre-Code, its reach exceeds its budget and the plot resolves like the director just realized the last reel was fluttering out fast; I suspect it's profoundly confusing if you have no affinity for the tropes of the culture depicted and it might be awkward even if you do, since I know that not everyone—including me—has an infinite tolerance for mothers who express love by hectoring and fathers who'd dream all day on the clock if you let them, never mind whether Sholem Aleichem wrote them first. I think the fairest thing to say about The Heart of New York is that it's a Yiddish comedy that just happens to be in English. I enjoyed watching it immensely and I suspect there are reasons I've never seen anything like it in the days of the Production Code. In the incomprehensible words of Bernard Shnaps: "If I'm not here, I'm there. If I'm not there, where am I? I'm here. And there you are." This venture brought to you by my inventive backers at Patreon.
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I'm amazed that this movie is real. What a find!
Nine
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I've seen enough pre-Code movies that in general they've stopped feeling like imports from some alternate cinematic universe, but this one still does. Maybe there are more like it out there. I'm glad of this one no matter what.
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Awesome!
Has a lot of the Yiddish cinema from that period survived? Any of it been subtitled?
Yes and yes! I've seen some of it myself. A major source for DVDs is the National Center for Jewish Film. There's also an excellent book on the subject called Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds (1992/2010) by J. Hoberman.
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I like the love-potato joke.
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I was so happy to discover it.
I like the love-potato joke.
When the jokes land, they're worth liking! I'm thinking seriously of trying to track the original stories down.
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Hee. I'll buy it!
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It had been made, it still existed, and I could see it: it made me happy.
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Dale is Bernard Shnaps, a fast-talking wheeler-dealer whose double-sided business cards are crammed with small print to cover all contingencies from "silverware and underwear" to "steamship tickets, foreign exchange, and oranges" ("Mortgages! It's a terrible printer")
When I moved to the Midwest in the early 70s, I encountered several goyim with cards like this. A decade later, I was working at the print shop that made those cards--we had a $10 for 500 special, because we printed ten different cards on a sheet. It's delightful how shamelessly people are willing to market themselves on tiny slips of paper.
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Thank you!
A decade later, I was working at the print shop that made those cards--we had a $10 for 500 special, because we printed ten different cards on a sheet.
Hee. That's wonderful.
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Now THERE'S a vivid turn of phrase ...
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Thank you!