Special Pleading

Four current movies plead the cause of the Jews in Palestine. Historical context and merits of their own give three of them a moving, urgent forcefulness; but all four are too heavily packed with propaganda for general effectiveness.

The most ambitious, My Father's House (Kline & Levin), is the first full-length work of movie fiction to be made in Palestine. Story and script are by Meyer Levin; direction is by Herbert Kline (The Forgotten Village); most of the actors are amateurs. The film is the story of a European boy who gradually comes to realize that he will never again see his parents, who were killed by the Nazis. With the shock of this realization, he regresses into neurotic infancy and is slowly healed by the knowledge that all Israel is "his father's house." Much of the story suffers from a painful kind of self-pitying, allegory-laden archness; the dialogue sounds like weak translation; the delivery and acting are wooden. The picture degenerates into a travelogue of Palestine, full of beautifully photographed landscapes.

Another full-length film, The Great Betrayal (Screencraft; Idea Film), concentrates on the incalculable labor that has gone into raising up Zion out of wasteland. It is photographed harshly and powerfully, and cut in the manner more brilliantly developed by Sergei Eisenstein. Despite its repetitiousness, the best of the film is an impressive--and exhausting--screen poem about hard work, and the profound sense of identity with a piece of the world that grows out of it.

House In the Desert (Palestine Films; United Palestine Appeal) is a 27-minute documentary story of a hard, admirable piece of pioneering: the washing of salt from a few hundred acres of the Dead Sea desert, and the reclamation of the soil. It is crudely made, but at its best moments its crudity and deep emotion seem more proper to each other than polish could be.

Assignment: Tel-Aviv (Paul Falkenberg; United Palestine Appeal) is the clearest effort among the four to appeal to non-Jews. It is also the least effective. It is no more than a slightly humanized travelogue, in uneven color, narrated by the glossily chummy voice of Quentin (London Can Take It) Reynolds.

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