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Defense of the "oath in the temple of healing," with a conscious stylistic debt to Street Scene. (Vidor returns the compliment in The Citadel.) Nighttime in the Lower East Side household reveals a prime Gregory La Cava clan, Papa (Gregory Ratoff) demands a game of chess with his studious son and then blames his defeat on the noisy living room. "There's more traffic in this place than on 5th Avenue!" White gloves suit the boy who grows into a diligent doctor (Ricardo Cortez), the enterprising brother (Noel Madison) sees no future in the slums so he gets Mama (Anna Appel) to spur him on to uptown fortune, thus the spiritual crisis. Not the showbiz fable of The Jazz Singer but an identity dilemma all the same, the young Jew suspended between New and Old World. Sterile luxury in the skyscraper of the surgeon with the "Million Dollar Hands," opposite it is the everyday struggle at the neighborhood clinic, where the childhood friend with a crooked spine (Irene Dunne) teaches blind kids. (After a boy expires in bed while the protagonist humors a rich neurotic, she hobbles into his office to bathe him in indignation.) The ethnographic staging of the pidyon haben ceremony is unique outside of Ulmer's Yiddish films, it segues into the operating theater with a striking sequence of scalpels swiftly exchanging hands while Papa lies on the table below the frame. "God will guide your fingers." Max Steiner's score incorporates Oyfn Pripetshik and Kol Nidre for a continuous pulse, La Cava has a little joke to set up this melodic element. "Mozart. Beethoven. Rubinstein." "But he's a tailor." "A different Rubinstein!" Private Worlds is a companion piece. With Lita Chevret, John St. Polis, Julie Haydon, Helen Freeman, and Josephine Whittell. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |