THE FIXER by John Frankenheimer
October 28th, 2004 by Andre Soares
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
THE POLITICS OF MARTYRDOM
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 pseudo-hip 1960s kitsch (e.g., quick cuts from extreme closeups to medium shots), his pacing feels deliberately sluggish, and his inept handling of actors is an irritating 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’s 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 inner 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 his appearances in prestigious productions such as Georgy Girl and Far from the Madding Crowd — and who apparently had it in his contract that he had to 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 part.
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.
But 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 great 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. Sadly, 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.
Synopsis:
In early twentieth-century Russia, a secular, non-political Jew, Yakov Bok (Alan Bates), has just been abandoned by his wife, Raisl (Carol White). Heartbroken, Yakov decides to leave his small village and travel to Kiev, where he must pose as a gentile so as to avoid the deadly anti-Jewish riots known as pogroms.
Unaware of the young man’s origins, an alcoholic anti-Semitic merchant, Lebedev (Hugh Griffith), hires Yakov as his handyman, or "fixer." A dedicated employee, Yakov soon rises to a managerial position much to the dismay of a disgruntled fellow worker. Yakov’s skills are equally successful at Lebedev’s home, for he wins both the heart and the body of the merchant’s daughter, Zinaida (Elizabeth Hartman).
All is lost, however, when a neighborhood boy is murdered and Yakov’s real background is revealed. He is accused of the murder and sent to prison — without charges — despite his vehement declarations of innocence. A government attorney, Bibikov (Dirk Bogarde), believes Yakov’s story, but his attempts at freeing his client are constantly thwarted by the viciously anti-Semitic bureaucracy of Czarist Russia. Despite suffering constant physical and psychological torture, Yakov refuses to confess to a crime he didn’t commit. Also, if he does admit guilt, Jews all over Russia will suffer the consequences.
As the abuses get increasingly more violent, Yakov becomes ever more determined to clear his name in court. The apolitical Jew has now become an activist political prisoner intent on retaining his sanity so he can beat the ruthless Czarist Establishment.
Notes:
Mendel Beiliss, the Jewish bricklayer whose story served as inspiration for The Fixer, was eventually acquitted by an all-Christian jury. In the 1920s, he emigrated to the United States, where he wrote his memoirs, The Story of My Sufferings.
In 1975, The Fixer was one of several books removed from the Islands Tree District libraries on Long Island, NY, because of their "anti-Christian" and "anti-American" content. Following the removal, a supervisor contacted the New York Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit on behalf of five students. In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that school officials could not remove books from libraries simply because they disliked the books’ content.
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