THE FIXER Review – Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde

THE FIXER (1968)

Direction: John Frankenheimer

Cast: Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde, Georgia Brown, Hugh Griffith, Elizabeth Hartman, Ian Holm, David Opatoshu, David Warner, Carol White

Screenplay: Dalton Trumbo; from Bernard Malamud's 1966 novel

Oscar Movies

Alan Bates, Ian Holm (background), Dirk Bogarde, The Fixer

In 1969, director John Frankenheimer declared that he felt "better about The Fixer than anything I've ever done in my life." Considering Frankenheimer's previous output — Seven Days in May, the much admired The Manchurian Candidate — it is hard to believe that the director was being anything but a good PR man for his latest release.

Adapted from Bernard Malamud's National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (which itself was based on the real story of Jewish bricklayer Mendel Beiliss), The Fixer is an overlong, overblown, and overwrought contrivance that, albeit well meaning, carelessly misuses most of the talent involved while sadistically abusing the patience (and at times the intelligence) of its viewers.

Frankenheimer is responsible for much of what goes wrong in this potentially gripping story set in Czarist Russia, in which an imprisoned "apolitical" Jewish man, Yakov Bok (Alan Bates), refuses to confess to a murder he didn't commit. The director's camera setups are often pure 1960s kitsch (e.g., quick cuts from extreme closeups to medium shots), his pacing feels deliberately sluggish, and his inept handling of actors is a major letdown — especially when one remembers, say, Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate or Ava Gardner in Seven Days in May.

Dalton Trumbo, however, is an even bigger disappointment. The formerly blacklisted screenwriter, whose credits include Roman Holiday and Spartacus, opts for preachy lectures in place of actual dialogue. The result is a pompous history lesson about human inhumanity to human — or, more specifically, Christian inhumanity to Jews.

Strangely, the sociopolitical roots of the relentless cruelty shown in the film, including the bloody depiction of a pogrom, are never made quite clear. And among numerous other gaps and inconsistencies, Trumbo's screenplay never explains why the Russian authorities didn't simply shoot the obstinate Yakov in the back while "he was trying to escape." (They certainly had no qualms about killing his attorney.) Moreover, we are supposed to take at face value Yakov's declaration that he could not have murdered anyone because that would have gone against the tenets of his religion — when any of the murderous Christians shown in the film could have come up with the same excuse.

Worse yet, neither Frankenheimer nor Trumbo trusts us to grasp the motivations of the film's characters through the actors' gestures or facial expressions. Thus, The Fixer feeds its audience a steady diet of explanatory monologues and speeches in which we are told bit by bit what goes on inside the characters' minds.