Tales from the Warner Archives #1: "Bye Bye Braverman" (Lumet, 1968)

"It should have been a soufflé, but it turned out a pancake." So director Sidney Lumet described his 1968 film Bye Bye Braverman in his entertaining book Making Movies. Andrew Sarris, describing the film in his book The American Cinema, is a bit kinder, citing "marvelous" and "affecting" work by some of its cast; still, Sarris says, the picture is "as courageous in its conception as it is vulgar in its execution."

What's so courageous about it's conception, you may ask. And I'll then ask you: how many studio pictures do you know of concerning the mid-life crises of a small group of New York Jewish intellectuals? So there. And this one's plot—in which the aforementioned fellows convene for the funeral of an old pal—seems to take its cue from the "Hades" section of Joyce's Ulysses. At least that's what Stanley Edgar Hyman said of the Wallace Markfield novel upon which the Herb Sargent script is based. (Markfield himself: "I can't say that Joyce is important to me. But what writer has not been influenced by Joyce?") Again, pretty highbrow for a Hollywood picture. Then again, the town was opening up at that time. 

Given its milieu and the fact that Lumet is one of the most indefatigable cinematic chroniclers of NYC, the movie maintains a very distinct curiosity value, one which can now be satisfied via its DVD release from the Warner Archive. After checking it out for the first time in decades—I think the first and last time I saw it was in a truncated version on WABC's "The 4:30 Movie" or some such program—I somewhat regret having to report that Lumet's a pretty good judge of his own work. Braverman has its moments—quite a few of them, in fact—but on the whole it's a bit of a botch. 

Here's Lumet again, from an interview I conducted with him for the DGA Quarterly in the fall of 2007: "On Braverman, I was just not that ready to deal with that level of comedy. I wasn't that firm about it, I wasn't that secure about it.  I wasn't that knowledgeable about it." Indeed. Had Sargent's script had a more realistic tenor to it, Lumet might have been on firmer footing. But the picture is dotted with fantasy sequences in which the picture's lead character, Monroe Rieff (George Segal), imagines, say, his wife's reaction to his own death. Lumet handles these bits of mordant neurotic whimsy by having cinematographer Boris Kaufman shoot them in a haze of diffusion, and stage them in a broad fashion that calls to mind nothing so much as the naughty-kitsch TV series Love American Style. Lumet's on much surer footing with the serio-sarcastic exchanges between Rieff's fellow intellectual buddies (played by a surprisingly effective Jack Warden and a spectacular, pre-Boss Hogg Sorrell Booke) and their one-time professor (a really marvelous Joseph Wiseman—yes, Dr. No), who at first refuses to ride with the group because Booke's driving a Volkswagon. 

Also rather moving is the group's eloquent silence in a montage of their drive through Brooklyn's Williamsburg. In the '60s, cosmopolitan New Yorkers still saw the borough as a place to escape from, not migrate to, and their compelled return inspires them to take on looks of mournful defeat. Little touches such as that make Braverman a kind of unexpectedly acute cinematic time capsule. 

Other sights in the film produce similar frissons. As in, wow, look at how thick the Sunday New York Times used to be. In the summer, no less. That's Zohra Lampert carrying it. The picture showcases Lampert and two other thinking men's sex symbols of the era, Jessica Walter and Phyllis Newman. Also, it's the film in which lead actor Segal definitively added "over-educated schlub" to his character quiver.

And after that...well, it's mostly documentary value for New York nuts. As in this view of Sheridan Square—the Smiler's and the cigar shop are still there, and in large part unchanged, today!

 
Pintchik's hardware, on the border pretty much between Boerum Hill and Park Slope, had a much more elaborate facade back in the day:

And so on. 

Comments

[Griff]

This remains one of my favorite Lumet films. I prefer it, I think, to a lot of the pictures on which he presumably felt on firm or knowledgeable footing -- he really serves the idea of the Markfield novel here and gets across a lot of the (very funny) Herb Sargent screenplay. All right, some of it is a botch, but it isn't the collapsed soufflé Lumet thinks it is. The cast is great, and while the movie is occasionally too thoughtful even for what it is... it keeps moving at a good clip.

[ratskiwatski]

I've always had a soft spot for Lumet's comedies. All of them contain varying degrees of clank, but none deserve to have fallen quite so far down between the cracks. Especially fond of Garbo Talks, a broad, sweet, sad New York picaresque, as well as the so very... loud Just Tell Me What You Want (wherein Alan King got to do his Alan King thing at unusual length, and Ali McGraw blessedly and expertly (!) did not do her usual Ali McGraw thing.)

The thing that finally smokes me out of lurkdom - Sidney Lumet comedies. Jesus. Maybe I'll drop back by when GK weighs in on a batch of lost Antonioni two-reelers. Some biblioteca or other collapses around Monica Vitti, Keaton-style. At 48 fps.

[Stephen Bowie]

Zohra Lampert was a very eccentric actress (pure Method, I'm guessing) and sexy in her weird way.

Glenn, you left out the best scene: the one with Godfrey Cambridge as the black cab driver who's more Jewish than the "real" Jews. I don't know how "good" BYE BYE BRAVERMAN is, but it sure cracks me up.

Somebody reminded me recently how rare it's been until now -- didn't seem so to me, since I caught it on TV just when I was becoming a movie geek. Now, when's the Archive gonna deliver THE LAST OF THE MOBILE HOT SHOTS / BLOOD KIN, the impossible-to-see late-60s Lumet movie that I actually haven't seen?

[Stephen Bowie]

PS - I'm not sure Lumet can handle anything that's not grounded in realism. That's why THE WIZ and CRITICAL CARE are so close to unwatchable.

The main thing I like about FIND ME GUILTY, though, is the dark comedy.

[walter trale]

late to the party as i was away from computers but just chiming in to say i've longed to see this film for years as the wallace markfield novel, "to an early grave", is a masterpiece. brilliant and hilarious. as per joyce, his second novel "teitlebaum's window", is very much a joyce in jewish brooklyn novel. both are available from dalkey archive. his third saddly remains out of print. while not up to the standard of the first two its account of a lenny bruce type comic has some amazingly funny moments (speaking to a jewish woman's group: "ladies, never be ashamed that you're jewish. its enough i'm ashamed you're jewish"). so yes, read "to an early grave", perhaps the definitive book on the jewish new york 50's/60's intellectual scene.