Although Hollywood has not entirely ignored the existence of the State of Israel, Stanley Kramer’s production The Juggler, now going the rounds of American theaters, represents the first really ambitious effort in American films to make cinematic use of the landscape and social problems of the young country. Nathan Glick here discusses how well the Hollywood approach has succeeded in conveying the Israeli reality.
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The story of Israel seems, on the surface, a natural for Hollywood. It is, after all, an epic of pioneers, and the folklore of pioneering has been a staple of American films for nearly fifty years. The themes of the “Western” are the themes of Israel: refuge from tyranny and from city life, the crude settlement carved out of a wilderness, the drawn-out guerrilla warfare with a primitive native enemy, the conflict between individualist and communal ethics, the hope of a new beginning.
But when Hollywood did decide to make use of this new frontier, it was with a certain half-heartedness. Although a crew was sent to Israel to make The Juggler on location, the advertising for the film carefully avoids any hint of its subject and background. The reason for this is no doubt chiefly commercial: Americans may feel benevolently towards Israel, but they do not feel particularly involved. And the commercial failure of the English-language Israeli film My Father’s House (1947) may have been one discouraging element. My Father’s House, produced by Meyer Levin, was a simple, sentimental film that treated Israeli life and geography with a good deal of documentary poetry. Its failure could be explained by the absence of any actors known to American movie-goers, by its slow pace and quiet manner, and possibly most of all by a lack of enterprise on the part of American exhibitors.
Like My Father’s House, The Juggler tells the story of the rehabilitation of a concentration camp victim in Israel, but it has the pace, the glamor, the fundamental extroversion that distinguish American movies. Kirk Douglas is called Hans Muller and is supposed to be impersonating a German Jewish vaudeville juggler, but his pugilist movements, his hysteria, his aggressive self-pity are borrowed whole from his parts in The Champion, Ace in the Hole, and Detective Story. As a specimen of kibbutz beauty, Milly Vitale is peculiarly improbable, with her light eyes, elusive accent, crisp shorts, and stiff, sturdy Boy Scout’s way with a rifle. The Juggler follows the example of My Father’s House in seizing on the visual and musical excitement of a hora danced at night around a bonfire, but now the hora is staged like a musical number, with the camera boomed high to photograph a perfect circle of smooth, handsome, and flavorless couples. And throughout the film, the theme of rehabilitation is submerged in the clipped plot of a thriller chase which allows brief and teasing glimpses of the prickly Israeli landscape.
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Still, as a way of getting at the phenomenon of Israel, the story of The Juggler has much in its favor. The regeneration of the victimized Central and East European Jew is, if not the whole meaning of Israel, certainly its most poignant contemporary meaning. The Juggler responds to this theme with a quick and natural good will that is characteristically American, yet parallels the energy and communal temper of Israel. Evoking the familiar contrast of American bluntness and optimism against European sophistication and pessimism, The Juggler merely substitutes Israel for America in opposition to a Europe which has added the experience of the concentration camp. The hero’s misfortunes are thus seen to arise from his inability to understand that people in Israel are exactly what they seem, that in Israel doctors cure and policemen protect. Instead he brings with him his fanatical European suspicions, the search for evil motives behind simple gestures. He rejects the doctor’s offer of help; he smashes the face of a friendly policeman, by this act recreating for himself the familiar role of the hunted European Jew. Even the thirteen-year-old sabra boy and the young woman from the kibbutz who befriend him in his flight from the police feel impelled to speak of their straightforwardness when faced with the juggler’s penchant for evasive jokes.
A minor thematic contrast, played alongside this dominant one, is the hero’s imported contempt for human life set against Israel’s high valuation of individual lives. “We need everyone,” the doctor tells him. But the juggler, on three occasions, is prepared to kill without actually being threatened. When he aims a rifle at several Syrian patrol guards who are unaware of his presence, the kibbutz girl exclaims: “We don’t kill people in cold blood!” Her statement carries overtones, not merely of Israel’s humanism, but also of the ethics of the American “Western,” where you must give your enemy a fair chance to draw.
The hero, with his jumpy violence, his morbidity, his claustrophobia, and his relished cynicisms (“Home is a place you lose.” “Hope is a naughty word”) typifies an “unhealthy” European sensitivity that has been intensified by the experience of the concentration camp. The Israelis are not concerned to understand the juggler’s state of mind or the experience that produced it; they want only to cure him, to make him healthy and useful. In this the kinship of America and Israel is clearest: both are pioneer communities, setting a premium on health and practical ability, on action rather than reflection, on being sensible rather than possessing sensibility. “We need a juggler like we need a hole in the head,” says the Haifa relocation interviewer, sadly; later in the camp barracks a call is sent out for carpenters, masons, electricians, plumbers, and most of the men flock out in response, leaving the juggler behind with the sick and the aged. (Done more scrupulously, this scene could have been an astute dramatic device for posing Israel’s overwhelming occupational dilemma: her shortage of skilled labor and her fantastic abundance of traders and unskilled workers. Instead, the director and writer abandon the Israeli reality in order to impose an artificial “normality” and give the star his moody dramatic solo.)
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In Its treatment of the hero, however, the film reveals a split personality. Thematically, as we have seen, the juggler represents Europe’s sickness as contrasted with Israel’s health. Thus the hopeful ending of the film consists simply in his admitting he is a sick man and crying out to be helped, and we are allowed to assume that now his sickness will be cured. But behind its surface commitment to normality, The Juggler glorifies the bitter disenchantment of the outlaw. The hero’s cynical wit forms the intellectual cornerstone of the movie; without it, the dialogue would collapse of sheer inanity. The Juggler may symbolize a lost cause, but he wins most of the verbal exchanges. Asked why he hides the fact that he has been in a concentration camp, he says, “I’m selfish about my pleasures.” Even the tired unoriginality of many of his jokes serves to deepen his effect. When he says, “If all the old men would hire young men to die for them, a young man could make a very nice living,” he is repeating a traditionally ironic piece of Jewish dialectic, and thus suggesting that his cynicism has roots in a Jewish wisdom more ancient and perhaps more typical than the pioneering optimism of Israel’s kibbutzim.
This subterranean espousal of the outwardly disapproved qualities of the juggler reveals not merely the Hollywood writer’s cynicism about the myths he refurbishes, but even more the necessities of the star system, in which the protagonist, whether good or evil, must be somehow admirable and superlatively endowed, and thus on some level must triumph over whatever moral ideas his story is designed to present. Hans Muller is not only a juggler, he is the best juggler in the world—though we never see him juggle more than three balls. He wins instant affection from children and instant love from the first Israeli girl he meets. In his readiness to declaim his guilt, torture, and self-pity, he is a veritable Hamlet, as well as very close to Hollywood’s portrait of the movie writer in Sunset Boulevard. And while his profession may strike the interviewer in Haifa as superfluous, Hollywood clearly prefers the reaction of the Israeli children who find it wonderful and magical; it is Hollywood’s own professional myth that the talented entertainer is God’s special gift to man.
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Significantly, the one deception that Douglas carries off with full conviction is the juggler’s pretense—allegedly for the purpose of throwing off his pursuers—that he is an American. When he tells his admiring young sabra guide that he is Rita Hayworth’s cousin, that he lived in Hollywood, and that he taught Hopalong Cassidy to ride a horse, he is playing a complicated game of identity. The function of this game is to call up the Israeli’s envy and admiration of American wealth and glamor, at the same time that it neutralizes the American spectator’s presumed resistance to the foreignness of the subject by assuring him that the hero is, after all, only Kirk Douglas acting a part.
If the virtues of The Juggler arise from the affinities of America and Israel, its failures derive from an inability of the American film-makers to absorb what is alien to American experience. The whole meaning of the concentration camp is squeezed into the claustrophobia of close quarters, and the hero’s reaction becomes a variation of the “Western” theme, “Don’t fence me in.” The film’s response to any profounder sickness of soul is a good-natured and bossy impatience. Its treatment of contemporary Israeli life likewise misses much that is indigenous and real. The Israeli kibbutz comes to resemble a comfortably appointed American adult vacation camp where people sit around reading newspapers, joking about the coffee (“It’s improving: last week it tasted like dishwater, today like tea”), watching entertainments, or dancing the hora. No one is shown to us at work.
Perhaps the most glaring failure, however, is the absence of any personal, intense feeling for the history and landscape of Palestine (the kind of feeling, for example, that My Father’s House showed in its use of Jewish holiday celebrations and its contrast of the old and new Jerusalems). It is almost heartbreaking to think that the film company traveled all the way to Israel and came back with such a poverty of scenes of daily life, whether in the streets, in homes, or in the kibbutz; or that landscapes familiar to the Western imagination for almost two thousand years should be treated with such offhand flatness. Most of all, The Juggler lacks a sense of tradition. But perhaps sheer indifference is preferable, after all, to the lacquered fetishism or the supernatural hush (in Parker Tyler’s phrase) that too often passes in Hollywood for piety.
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