Dear Editor
Dear Editor Benigni's Double Feature Ruth Gruber misses a significant aspect of the movie Life is Beautiful ("Benigni's Corrective Vision," NL, April 5). It is, in all its actuality, a...
...Few debutantes or Hooray Henrys, who were very much "U" and said things like "napkin" instead of "serviette" and "dinner" instead of "tea," had gone to college...
...His being Jewish is merely incidental and they live happily ever after...
...It shows how Guido manages to keep his son alive and communicate with his non-Jewish princess wife, who had insisted on being deported on the same train as her husband and child...
...Having it off," well, that's another matter entirely...
...First, the British do not speak much of "U and non-U" anymore...
...Peconic, N. Y. Sidney Waxler Ruth Ellen Gruber replies: Rivers of ink have been spilled over the issues raised by Sidney Waxier, including the "double feature" aspect of Life is Beautiful My purpose in The New Leader, however, as I think was clear, was not to rehash those old debates yet again...
...By demeaning Levi's memory and his agonizing effort to bear witness to "the Nazi assault on humanity" Benigni trivializes what Levi has said to all who would listen...
...The second film is about life in a Nazi concentration camp, presumably Auschwitz...
...Second, as the title suggests, Jessica's sister had in mind the upper class...
...in things Jewish," and suggests that Benigni was playing to the market...
...Indeed, the depiction of the concentration camp is done so discreetly that when Guido is caught in the glare of a spotlight while climbing a wall, he is escorted to an alleyway and executed out of sight of the audience...
...Too Clever by Half My New Leader colleague Michael Lind has it wrong ("Liberals at the Gas Station," NL, April 19-May 3...
...The first film is about a good natured Italian, Guido, who revels in clownish antics and comic stories and who finally marries the princess of his dreams...
...Closer ("Taxing Imports" NL, April 19May 3): "Before you can say quickie, the couple is having it on...' Where I come from "having someone on" means to deceive them—to pull their leg...
...New York, N. Y. Chris Syms Stefan Kanfer replies: I appreciate Chris Syms' kind words...
...So, was the couple having it off, or was Kanfer having us on...
...I was confused, therefore, by his use of my native slang in his review of Patrick Marber's new play...
...Gruber's comments are exclusively about the first movie, which she sees as a tale about an assimilated Italian Jew who, to quote Benigni, "was not recognizable by precise signs, but who was the same as I am...
...the reference was not to recent university graduates...
...Not for him such empty phrasemaking as to call Nicole Kidman's coy turn in The Blue Room "sheer theatrical Viagra," as one London newspaper did...
...This may help explain why she fails to express any judgment about the second film, despite its portraying a sanitized Auschwitz without Kapos and their truncheons, without sadistic Nazi troops who used their rifle butts and boots against the subhuman species they expected would be extinct in about six months...
...In addition, the filmmaker reveals a deafness to the voices of those who did, and some of those who didn't, survive the destruction of Europe's Jews—not to mention a vision that doesn't see beyond the box office...
...It is, in all its actuality, a double feature compressed into a single length film...
...Gruber tells us Life is Beautiful was made for Italians who are experiencing a "boom of interest...
...That was years and years ago (or 1956), when Nancy Mitford helped to popularize the labels in a book she edited, which was entitled Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the identifiable Characteristics of the British Aristocracy...
...Rather, I sought to point out circumstances related to the film that have not been noted in other commentaries, particularly ones concerning the specific Italian context in which Benigni's movie was made...
...As three-time Prime Minister Lord Salisbury said of a Left-wing Tory, they tended to think of those who had as too clever by half...
...The success of his film is a depressing and frightful signal that chapters will be added to Primo Levi's record of the "assault on humanity...
...On or Off...
...But the audience knows that more than ridicule was needed to stop Nazism...
...Gruber does, however, hold up to criticism a pop entertainer, Moni Ovadia, for marketing a Jewishness whose "punchlines often revolve around Jewish greed and Jewish noses...
...England and America," as the Irishman George Bernard Shaw observed, "are two countries separated by a common language...
...But merchandising Jewishness is of a very different moral order than the merchandising of Auschwitz and the Holocaust, especially in the country that deported Primo Levi in a cattle car...
...Nevertheless Guido, the assimilated Jew, was deported and all that Benigni can offer as a clue to why occurs in the first movie: During a farcical skit at a school he heaps scorn on the Nazi ideology of racial superiority...
...Another quibble: Adlai Stevenson may have been "the candidate of thinking Americans," whatever those are, but his support was far wider than that...
...London Norman Gelb...
...As a temporary refugee from the hyperbole of London's theater scene, I have begun to appreciate Stefan Kanfer's witty and accurate theater reviews...
Vol. 82 • May 1999 • No. 6
