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| Molly Picon |
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A film starring the New-York-born Yiddish theatre star Molly Picon as a girl in Jewish Poland who goes out on the road with her grandfather to earn a living playing music. For the sake of safety and propriety, she dresses as a boy, with predictable results: she falls in love with the other fiddler, Froim (Leon Leibgold), who of
course is incapable of seeing Yidl, no matter how wonderfully she (he)
plays. Though the cross-dressing disguise theme is conventional enough in stage-plays in many traditions--think Shakespeare's
As You Like It and
Twelfth Night, for instance--it usually works better on stage than on film. Picon's disguise as a boy is not especially convincing,
and the disguise plot is predictable and somewhat silly. She falls in love with the other fiddler, Froim (Leon Leibgold), who of
course is incapable of seeing Yidl, no matter how wonderfully she (he)
plays. Even when he rescues Yidl from a swiftly-flowing river he doesn't realize he's carrying an adoring, wet-clothed young woman in his arms.
This is because Froym's attentions are directed elsewhere, at the singer Taubele (Dora Fakiel), who is lovely and rather nice. Then she is discovered by producers who quickly make her a star--but she doesn't care for the limelight and just before the curtain rises for a performance chooses true love over stardom.
So, in an interesting twist on the understudy plot--the reverse of the story where the scheming newcomer viciously supplants the star who nourished her--Yidl takes the stage. There Picon’s charm is manifest as she insists she’s not a boy and pleads with the audience not to laugh.
Importantly, the film captures something of the tone of an eastern-European folk-tale, but the screenplay was developed by the Yiddish theatre actor, Joseph Green (Yoysef Grinberg), a Jewish emigré from Poland, who had acted in several films including
The Jazz Singer) and made four Yiddish movies in the 1930s. The music isn't really traditional klezmer, but the work of composer Abraham Ellstein (composer in the Yiddish theater) with lyrics by the poet Itsik Manger. There's a clip of one song on YouTube
here. Another fine feature of the movie is the way the film captured the disappeared world of pre-holocaust Poland, not so much the countryside and the
shtetl but urban Jewish markets and communities.
