Protection, I'm giving you up—correction, I'm saying that I'm right enough

[sovay]

Carrie Rickey's "Hollywood: Where Jews Don't Get to Play Jews" is a very good article about exactly the phenomenon the title describes: the venerable Hollywood tradition of casting non-Jews to play Jewish characters, of which the flipside is all the Jewish actors you wouldn't know from their changed names. She calls it "Hollywood's Jewish Paradox" and ties it to anti-Semitism and the Production Code, Henry Ford and Joseph Breen, the Jewish studio moguls' fears of the perception of undue Jewish influence. It's part of the reason The Ten Commandments (1956) is such a surreal experience and Out of the Fog (1941) stings so badly and I remain grateful and amazed that a movie like The Heart of New York (1932) even exists. I recommend reading. There's just one point I wish she had articulated a little more:

It may seem counterintuitive, but Darryl F. Zanuck, the one Gentile studio chief, was committed to making films about Jews.

I have noted the issue before and I am hardly the first to feel it: that part of being accepted as a Jew in a majority non-Jewish society is not talking about anti-Semitism. Agree it's a problem when disinterested goyische parties point it out. Otherwise it's that special pleading that Breen complained about with Crossfire (1947), it's playing the Holocaust card, it's stealing attention from really marginalized people. So it's not counterintuitive at all. It was safe for Zanuck to make movies about Jews because he wasn't one of them. He wouldn't be accused of tribalism, of exploiting his control of Hollywood to advance his people's agenda. He could rock the boat without being ascribed ulterior motives. Rickey alludes to these forces earlier in her article: "Given this charged atmosphere, no Jewish mogul wanted to make his studio, his movies or his religion a target for attacks. Jewish producers worried that movies about Jews would incite anti-Semitism. Thus Jews as Jews on screen were almost invisible, and Jews played by non-Jews scarcely less so." I just wish she'd drawn the link to the latitude afforded Zanuck—and non-Jewish actors, playing ideas of Jewishness with no danger of being reduced to the real thing—a little more strongly. I mean I still want to have seen Defiance (2008) with Jason Isaacs. The next person who tells me that Call Me by Your Name (2017) wasn't groundbreaking had better have a list of big, sweeping, non-Holocaust, non-Orthodox, non-tragic queer Jewish romances to back it up.

Comments

[muccamukk]

Zanuck also had a habit of wandering around acting like he was the first person on Earth to have considered that anti-Semitism was a thing, in conversation with his Jewish co-workers, which I'm surprised didn't get him murdered in his bed (I'm not actually surprised, but STILL...)

Everyone mostly seems busy freaking out about how CMbYN is paedophilia somehow. I need to get around to seeing it.

[sovay]

Zanuck also had a habit of wandering around acting like he was the first person on Earth to have considered that anti-Semitism was a thing, in conversation with his Jewish co-workers, which I'm surprised didn't get him murdered in his bed

I had not realized that scene between Phil and his secretary in Gentleman's Agreement was roman à clef. Oh, man. I share your surprise.

Everyone mostly seems busy freaking out about how CMbYN is paedophilia somehow. I need to get around to seeing it.

I recommend it! I saw it in March with rushthatspeaks and barely wrote about it and loved it. The age difference concern feels mostly like trolling to me, especially since it's addressed directly and not lampshadingly in the script.

[muccamukk]

I know that the boardroom scene was almost word for word. I'm less sure about the secretary, but I would not be surprised. He must have been fun to work with!

I need to see it. There are so few gay movies at all, let alone period ones with happy endings. Haven't been watching much lately.

[sovay]

Haven't been watching much lately.

I hope you get a chance to catch up soon. How's your ankle?

[muccamukk]

It's better, or Work Safe thinks it is anyway. I mean, I was off for three weeks, so I COULD have watched movies, but what I DID was watch Band of Brothers 5 consecutive times and write a lot of fan fic, lol.

I did see Race, which was... certainly interesting and oddly Canadian.

[sovay]

but what I DID was watch Band of Brothers 5 consecutive times and write a lot of fan fic, lol.

Sounds like a valid use of time to me.

What is Race?

[muccamukk]

It's a biopic of Jesse Owens, focusing on the 1936 Olympics. The cast was good (a bunch of no-name Canadians plus Jeremy Irons hired to be morally ambiguous). I'm not sure how I feel about the portrayal of Leni Riefenstahl, who seems have had her antagonism with Goebbels played up in order to sanitise her? A bit? It was otherwise fine, standards sports pic.

I also saw the one where Gregory Peck gets amnesia (no the other one), which was very silly. Mirage?

[sovay]

It's a biopic of Jesse Owens, focusing on the 1936 Olympics.

Neat. I hadn't known that was happening. I agree that I don't tend to think of Riefenstahl as one of the good guys.

the one where Gregory Peck gets amnesia (no the other one)

I'm delighted that has to be disambiguated.

[moon_custafer]

Mirage has Walter Matthau as a character who deserved his own film.

[sovay]

Mirage has Walter Matthau as a character who deserved his own film.

Oh, yeah?

[moon_custafer]

He’s a private eye hired by Peck, who admits right off the bat that this is his first case and that he was previously a refrigerator repairman. He’s also far more sensible than Peck.

[sovay]

He’s a private eye hired by Peck, who admits right off the bat that this is his first case and that he was previously a refrigerator repairman.

He sounds wonderful. Does he survive the amnesia plot?

[muccamukk]

Alas, he does not. That movie was trying to be four different things at once, and didn't do a single one of them well. It means a lot coming from me, and I'd have rather watched a movie with Walter Matthau as the MC, and Peck as his case. Or his love interest.

[kore]

but what I DID was watch Band of Brothers 5 consecutive times and write a lot of fan fic, lol.

WHICH WAS A FINE USE OF YOUR TIME. Despite the timeline shenanigans and Which One Is Who issues that was such a great series.

[kore]

When the U.S. entered World War II at the end of 1941, he was commissioned as a colonel in the Army Signal Corps, but was frustrated to find himself posted to the Astoria studios in Queens, Long Island, and even worse, serving alongside the spoiled son of Universal's founder, Carl Laemmle Jr., who was chauffeured by limousine to Long Island each morning from a luxury Manhattan hotel.
Appalled by such privileged cosseting, Zanuck stormed down to Washington, DC, and into the War Department, demanding a riskier assignment from Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall. Since American forces were not yet fighting anywhere, Marshall had Zanuck posted to London as chief U.S. liaison officer to the British Army film unit, where at least he would be studying army training films while under Nazi bombardment by Hitler's Luftwaffe in the still-ongoing Blitz.[6] Zanuck cheerfully endured the bombs, refusing to leave his room at Claridge's for its air-raid shelter during nightly raids and instead hosting "blitz parties" because he had such a splendid view of antiaircraft fire from his hotel room, not to mention coveted PX food and drink long missing from Britain's highly rationed shelves. He even persuaded Lord Mountbatten to allow him along on a secret coastal raid across the Channel to occupied France. The daring nighttime attack on a German radar site was a success. Zanuck, ever the showman, sent his wife in Santa Monica a package of "Nazi-occupied sand", writing her "I've just been swimming on an enemy beach" – not allowed, of course, to tell her where he'd been, let alone that they'd been under Nazi gunfire and helped the wounded back to the ship.

OMG. (From Zanuck: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Last Tycoon/Wiki)

[sovay]

Zanuck, ever the showman, sent his wife in Santa Monica a package of "Nazi-occupied sand", writing her "I've just been swimming on an enemy beach" – not allowed, of course, to tell her where he'd been, let alone that they'd been under Nazi gunfire and helped the wounded back to the ship.

I'm not saying he didn't have an impressive war, I'm just saying I'm not surprised he pissed his Jewish colleagues off when he got back from it!

I think the line about swimming must have been a popular soldier's understatement; it shows up in Thieves' Highway (1949), where Richard Conte's veteran tells an Italian girl that he once went "swimming in Italy . . . A place called Anzio."