◊ Note: The film Hester Street came out in 1975 — so it is now 50 years old. The following article was posted 15 years ago, when Hester Street had turned 35. It has been 35 years since Joan Micklin Silver’s film Hester Street first appeared on the silver screen. Although the slow-paced, 90-minute black-and-white drama…
From The Canadian Jewish News, December 2, 1960 Beirut, Lebanon – The turbulent Arab world was shaken by a new controversy this week over – of all people – that “dangerous Zionist” Elizabeth Taylor. The United Arab Republic, leader in the unrelenting Arab assault against the state of Israel, was painted as a culprit for…
From The City Magazine (Toronto Star), 1978 Nat Taylor emits a throaty laugh and his eyes twinkle when he is asked about his latest venture, a mammoth, 18-theatre cinema complex now under construction in the Eaton Centre. When completed in January, the complex will boast three times as many screens as any other Toronto movie…
Review of The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox, by Vanda Krefft Theda Bara (nicknamed ‘The Vamp’), one of Fox’s biggest stars, in a lavish 1917 production of Cleopatra. No known copy of the film survives. From the Canadian Jewish News, 2019 Although his surname appears in…
Born in 1887 to Jewish parents in Kalamazoo, Mich., American novelist and playwright Edna Ferber was a hardworking, overly modest, frequently self-effacing writer who read the critics too carefully and was too easily wounded by their sloppily-aimed slings and arrows. Convinced, for instance, that no one would want to read her novel So Big, she advised…
From the Canadian Jewish News, Aug. 7 1980 Peter Sellers, the famed actor who died recently, often spoke proudly of the fact that he was Jewish, even though he never practiced Judaism. According to the Jewish Chronicle News Service, Sellers was once asked by an interviewer if he was half-Jewish. His reply: “I am fully…
Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-old Author, by Herman Wouk (Simon & Schuster) ◊ Note: This review of Herman Wouk’s memoir was first published in 2016. Herman Wouk died on May 17, 2019, age 103. This slim volume, which the author describes as a “non-autobiography,” will be of special interest to people interested in…
JUDY HOLLIDAY OBIT, 1965 From the Canadian Jewish Review, June 18, 1965 Judy Holliday, an actress whose professional career was all comedy and whose later private life was all tragedy, introduced the word “couth” to the English language. The etymological creation was part of her portrayal of one of the most memorable of a noted…
From Canadian Jewish News, October 22, 2001 Bushmeat, an hour-long television documentary soon to air on the Discovery Channel, is a riveting, tautly-edited expose of the illicit trade in gorilla and chimpanzee meat in Cameroon and other countries of Central Africa. Toronto filmmaker Dawna Treibicz defied the odds to make this film about a subject that…
From the Canadian Jewish News, February 2014 As announced in obituaries in Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, the New York Times and other publications, screenwriting guru Syd Alvin Field died last November in Los Angeles at the age of 77. It’s been 35 years since Field’s book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting was first published in…
