Walton's Ghetto

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

LIES MY FATHER TOLD ME Directed by JAN KADAR Screenplay by TED ALLAN

The setting is a Montreal ghetto, around 1925. The protagonist is an extraordinarily appealing little boy named David (Jeffrey Lynas). Struggling for possession of his young mind are his father (Len Birman) and his grandfather (Yossi Yadin). The former is a hustler, determined to abandon traditional Jewish ways and invent his way upward (creaseless pants, expandable cuff links -so you can roll up your sleeves without unlinking them). The latter is a sweet-spirited, loving junk dealer, who is equally determined to imbue David with the belief that an Orthodox faith can still serve successfully as a guide to existence.

The contest, in short, is no contest. Fast-talking Dad is insensible to the emotional needs of the child or anyone else. Grandfather, besides being so nice, conducts his business from a horse-drawn wagon and lets David accompany him. What kid could resist him?

Based by Writer Ted Allan on an autobiographical short story he published in 1949, Lies My Father Told Me is a difficult movie to dislike. It deals mainly in the small change of daily doings -quarrels and friendships on the alley-courtyard where the boy lives, modest hopes raised and dashed, problems and disappointments clumsily but affectionately managed. Even the father is not really a bad man, just bombastic.

Familiar Stereotypes. Yet for all its affability, Lies is not a very effective work. The courtyard's population, for example, is a very predictable one. David's mother is long-suffering, the neighbors familiar stereotypes from a hundred warm-spirited recollections of ghetto life -a scholarly revolutionist, a troublemaking yenta, a feisty and good-spirited whore. The minute we meet them, we can call the turns they will eventually do, just as we know, almost from the film's first minute, that Grandfather will die before it ends.

Czech Director Jan Kadar (The Shop on Main Street) handles all his vignettes dryly, distantly, without the slightest excess of emotion. Normally such discipline, especially in an age of over wrought movies, would be a matter for applause. In a film that is so predictable, however, a little excess is called for. We need to feel a touch of genuine desperation in this slum or of craziness in the behavior of its inhabitants. Some how the Duddy Kravitz ambience has been infused with the spirit of Walton's Mountain, and the result is a bland respectability -safe, pleasant, without reverberation.

Richard Schickel

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