We are great admirers of most of Elia Kazan’s work but believes that his so heralded GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT is well off the mark; it trivializes anti-Semitism. The film was released in 1947, two years after the conclusion of World War II in which six million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis using various means. The plot of the film: A journalist played by Gregory Peck, pretends to be Jewish in order to uncover anti-Semitism in Post-War America. The climax of the film is when Mr. Peck is outraged because he is turned away from a hotel where he cannot get a room because they believe he is Jewish and his son is bullied in school for much the same reason. This Blogger is sure that the Jews slaughtered just four years before in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising would have gladly accepted Mr. Peck’s heartbreak, if given a chance. The moral of GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT is blatant; all acts of racial or religious discrimination, regardless of how small they are, are morally repugnant. That is an honorable position, but a snub is just simply not the same as a Holocaust. GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT, however, glorifies the snub in lieu of condemning the much larger crime - the Holocaust itself.
SCHINDLER’S LIST’s moral is even simpler and, unfortunately, really much more childishishly nonsensical; Nazis are bad and some Nazis are crazy. That is how "deep" it gets. However it is Henry Jaglom's new film TRAIN TO ZAKOPANE' which - for the first time on film - fulfills the moral imperative of relating what it actually must be like to be a Jew in an anti-Semitic country during an anti-Semitic time. And what is it like to be that person, even in the most seemingly unthreatening of circumstances before the horror breaks loose?
As Mr. Jaglom reveals in his film, it is like living your whole life on the side of a volcano, living
always on the side of Mount Vesuvius, never knowing when it will explode - or to what degree.
For a Jew then living on the side of that volcano, life was this - it didn't not matter whether one was a good person, an honorable person, a smart person, a decent person, a brilliant person,
a generous person, a creative person, a kind person, or a terrific family man. When the volcano explodes you will be killed and your family will be killed, regardless of any of your endearing traits, talents or attributes.
Being a Jew in an anti-Semitic world meant there was no protection against the wicked randomness of that volcano. The only question for any Jew in an anti-Semitic world was this - when will the volcano explode, killing me and all my family? There is no film in this blogger's living memory which better explains thatexistential, every day horror of being a Jew in an anti-Semitic world as does this latest film by Henry Jaglom, his crowning achievement.
The film is based on a true incident in the life of Mr. Jaglom's father, Simon Jaglom, which happened to the Jaglom pere on a train trip crossing Poland in the late 1920s. He was a very elegant and deeply sophisticated Jew from Czarist Russia, but not a "noticeable" Jew, not a FIDDLER ON THE ROOF Jew, a thoroughly integrated Russian Jew who found himself, by fate,
in a small train compartment with - among others - an attractive young Polish woman, a lovely nurse in fact in the very recently formed Polish army, who was also extremely inviting and desirable BUT clearly an anti-Semite of the highest and most hateful order. Simon Jaglom decided - while listening to her proclaim that she "could smell a Jew a kilometer away" - that he would seduce her for the pure pleasure of revenge, and only THEN, after sleeping with her, tell her that he was, in fact, Jewish - a very early form of what we sometimes now call "revenge porn." That, at least, was his initial plan.
Henry Jaglom's father and the anti-Semitic Polish army nurse flirt and kiss and perhaps more,
and then get off the train together at an elegant ski resort high in the Polish mountains that -
as we later learn - has another, even deeper meaning for him. In the aftermath of that seduction he learns that his family may, in fact, have had disturbing dealings with this nurse before, with tragic consequences. We also learn, from this deeply moving true story, that fate - and its lover, irony - does indeed work overtime.
The main character, Mr. Jaglom’s father, is played as a young man with a Robert Donat-like grace, by Mike Falkow. The nurse is played - most movingly, winningly, persuasively and fervently - by the sensationally powerful actress Tanna Frederick, Henry Jaglom's wife. The writer/director uses actual footage of his father, Simon M. Jaglom, as a witness in the film at 94 years of age as he now narrates his own story, a la REDS. And his appearance adds much great heft to the film, for he was eyewitness to all of the strange mechanics of romance and fate that makes up this gem, TRAIN TO ZAKOPANE'. The movie is a very intimate film, but in its intimacy, there is a truly important commentary on the grandeur of the human endeavor; though in form the film is a seemingly modest work, its significant and profound reflections on Life are as truly humbling as they are amazing. ABOVE ALL, IT IS ONE OF THE VERY BEST. ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT AND ONE OF THE MOST MOVING FILMS THAT YOU WILL HAVE SEEN IN A LONG TIME!
======================= Gerry Maxey. The Maxey Chronicles
