Romance of a Horsethief

It's hard to make a judgment on a film that you might want to say is far better than it appears. But the DVD I saw of Romance Of A Horsethief had the most horrible sound quality, one of the worst I ever heard with a film that had some justifiable reasons to consider it good. I must have missed any number of witticisms that came from Joseph and David Opatoshu, the father and son original creators of the work.

The same rueful acceptance, the same cynicism that characterized Fiddler On The Roof without the joyous music is found in Romance Of A Horsethief. It's 1904 and the Czarist armies are needing cavalry horses for the upcoming war with Japan which ironically enough turned out to be a naval war. So it's not like the American west where the cavalry actually bought and paid for mounts and cavalry horses became the fulcrum of many a western good and bad. No, in an absolute monarchy the Czar merely requisitions what he needs from the peasants be they Christian or Jew. Stealing from both you would think might get them to thinking we have a common enemy, but that fact takes a long time in realization.

Yul Brynner is the Cossack commander sent to the Russian part of occupied Poland whose job it is to run that part of Poland and get the Czar's horses. Eli Wallach is the amiable horse-thief whose profession has found a new status of honor he never expected in his life. He becomes a revolutionary in spite of himself.

Romance Of A Horsethief almost could have been a musical, there are places some numbers could have been dropped. Best in the cast is Lainie Kazan who makes quite the fool of Brynner the occupier. Who could resist Lainie's twin weapons of mass destruction?

A really bad sound quality keeps this last work of Abraham Polonsky from being a classic.

I'm at a loss to see how "unsubstantial" is a negative value in a comedy. Possibly the previous reviewer was more interested in director Polonsky's story than the movie.

I have always loved this film. It's one of those humanistic little gems like "Going In Style," "The Trouble With Harry'"and "Bye, Bye, Braverman." I first saw the film in 1971 and have remembered it with pleasure ever since. Fair warning: the DVD is a poor quality transfer, apparently from a VHS, with no digital enhancements. But the film is a delight and well worth your time. Lainie Kazan does, indeed, steal the show but Yul Brynner gives his Cossack a touch of gentle sadness in one of his rare restrained performances, while still offering a necessary bravado. Eli Wallach is excellent and David Opatashu displays great comic timing in the (very satisfying) finale as he impersonates a Cossack Inpector General.

Eli Wallach steals horses from the army's herds. The army steals horses from everyone else. David Opatoshu sells horses he knows he doesn't have so his sister can have a dowry and make a good marriage; and hot revolutionary Jane Birkin wears a white lace dress to a secret meeting in a muddy field -- I suppose the servants will clean it. This movie doesn't seem to me a story so much as a slice of life, and its contradictory absurdities less funny than the sort of disorganized thinking that comes with the Us-Against-Them mentality, reflected in the set design and trying to sneak a stolen horse out of a brothel by having Lainie Kazan expose her decolletage to Yul Brynner.

This absurd and old-fashioned comedy about Cossacks and Jews might have been a minor success played by the Yiddisher Bund in Warsaw in 1935 (my grandfather's second wife would have had fun in the Lainie Kazan role), or on 2nd Avenue in New York. By 1971, if the audience wanted to see something about Jews in Tsarist Russia, they could see FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, which was a lot more approachable.

In circa 1904 Polish Russia, the Czar has tasked Cossack Captain Stoloff (Yul Brynner) with requisitioning all of the horses he can for use in the Russo-Japanese War. This puts him at odds with a local group of Jewish peasants, led by Kifke (Eli Wallach), who trade in stolen horses. Brash young horse thief Zanvill (Oliver Tobias) is the most accomplished of the lot, and while that makes him a target for Stoloff, it doesn't help when Zanvill begins a romance with local noblewoman Naomi (Jane Birkin), just returned from France with revolutionary ideals.

This was scripted by David Opatoshu, and based on a novel by his father, a famous Yiddish writer. Opatoshu should be familiar to anyone who watched any television from the 1960's. This movie plays like a mash-up of two other 1971 releases, Fiddler on the Roof and Nicholas & Alexandra, and lacquered in a Tom Jones veneer. Oliver Tobias is the lead (he gets an "introducing" credit), and he was a noted theater star in Great Britain at the time. Both he and Birkin get overshadowed when any of their more notable co-stars are on screen, and the cast is unusual. Brynner and Wallach get to relive their Magnificent Seven days, while Lainie Kazan and Serge Gainsbourg seem dropped in from another planet.

Although I would like to give stars to Eli Wallach, the best in the cast and a great actor in other films like "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" (1966), "The Magnificent Seven" (1960) and others, Yul Brynner, also excellent in many other films, "The Magnificent Seven" (1960), "Morituri" (1965), ""Westworld" (1973) and many others, and Serge Gainsbourg for the extraordinary music he composed throughout his musical career, not for this film and not as an actor. The three of them were also the reason why I wanted to see the film, which turned out to be just a waste of an hour and 39 minutes, which is the length of the version I found on YouTube. Everything is lamentable in this production, the idea, the script, the direction, the acting. Why would the Russian army need horses in the war against Japan, which is an island, as the character Schloime Kradnik played by David Opatoshu also says? Most likely to eat them, not to ride them across the sea.