THE FIXER – Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde
The Fixer (1968)
Direction: John Frankenheimer
Screenplay: Dalton Trumbo, from Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel
Cast: Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde, Georgia Brown, Hugh Griffith, Elizabeth Hartman, Ian Holm, David Opatoshu, David Warner, Carol White
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. Among numerous other gaps and inconsistencies, the script 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.
Most of those monologues are given to leading man Alan Bates, as The Fixer is set up as a showcase for the respected film and stage actor, then near the peak of his popularity following leads in prestigious productions such as Georgy Girl and Far from the Madding Crowd — and whose contracts apparently demanded that he take his clothes off at least once in each of his films. In The Fixer, we do get to see Bates in the buff, but naked or clothed — and in spite of his Academy Award nomination — he is never convincing as anything but a well-educated Englishman.
Granted, Yakov is a literate man who is well versed in Espinoza and who speaks flawless Russian (that he learned by reading pronunciation books), but none of that explains how this Jewish peasant came to sound like someone who took diction lessons at Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Bates’ excessive grimacing and his calculated high-pitched exclamations only serve to further alienate him from the role.
Most of the other performances are equally exaggerated — one can’t expect anything else from professional scenery-chewers like Ian Holm and Hugh Griffith, but Elizabeth Hartman is surprisingly grating as Griffith’s libidinous daughter. The single exception in this orgy of miscasting is Dirk Bogarde’s effete defense attorney, a classy and self-contained impersonation that avoids all the dangerous pitfalls of self-parody.
Bogarde’s acting aside, the chief point of interest in The Fixer is the fact that it is based on an actual case. In the film, Yakov is none too subtly portrayed as a Christ-like figure who, because of his devotion to a liberating cause, is tortured, beaten, and raped by the representatives of a cruel society. More than a miscarriage of justice, the treatment of this innocent Jewish man at the hands of the rabidly anti-Semitic authorities of Czarist Russia is both horrifying and revolting.
Now, is The Fixer anti-Christian? Doubtlessly. The clearest example is the sequence in which a pathetic Orthodox priest nearly faints when he sees Yakov dressed in full Jewish regalia. But if one looks beyond Trumbo’s and Frankenheimer’s simplistic views on prejudice, The Fixer demonstrates that human beings can become martyrs for their causes irrespective of their religious background (if any), and that the perpetrators of the most horrific cruelties can be followers of any faith. (In his novels, Malamud reputedly used Jews as a metaphor for all humankind.)
The Fixer, in fact, would make a perfect double bill with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (which has been accused of being anti-Semitic), since both films deal with religious intolerance (i.e., sociopolitical control) while emphasizing in graphic detail the horrors of human suffering at the hands of other human beings belonging to other faiths.
Lastly, The Fixer has one important message worth remembering: We are all political beings. Whether or not we follow politics, everything we do — or don’t do — has political consequences.
It is thus unfortunate that despite the filmmakers’ best intentions and the film’s historical value, The Fixer is an unquestionable cinematic failure. There’s surely something deadly wrong with a film during which I was rooting for the martyred hero to confess to a murder he didn’t commit so my suffering would come to an end.
Academy Award Nomination
Best Actor: Alan Bates
Subscribe / Syndicate
3 Comments
Tags: Alan Bates, Bernard Malamud, Dalton Trumbo, Dirk Bogarde, Film Reviews, John Frankenheimer, Mendel Beiliss, Oscar 1968, Oscar Movies, Political Movies, Religion, The Fixer
Comments
3 Responses to “THE FIXER – Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde”
Leave a Reply
NOTE:
All comments are moderated and may take some time before they are posted. Different views and opinions are welcome, but courtesy is imperative. Rude/crass/bigoted comments and name-calling of any sort will be immediately deleted.
Also, please be aware that the Alternative Film Guide has no contact information for the talent mentioned in this blog and no information pertaining to or access to distributors'/producers' film prints.
i would like to purchase a dvd of this film. please advise thank you for your reply, pauline katz
I don’t believe it’s out on DVD. But there are some old VHS tapes available. Perhaps on ebay.
The Fixer is available in DVD (both DVD-R and
DVD+R) here: http://www.alanbates.com/shop.html.
Info about this amazing film is available at
The Alan Bates Film Archive here:
http://www.alanbates.com/abarchive/film/fixer.html.
I hope this is helpful.