Alec's Irish Roz

A Majority of One (Warner). A Jewish comedian once remarked that Jewish humor is universal: it can be understood in all five boroughs of New York City. This Jewish situation comedy is a case in point. It was one of Broadway's top dollars for 16 months (1959-60). but as a movie it will surely seem a little alien to an average goy west of the Hudson. Nevertheless, to those with a taste for such things. Majority will come as a warm though slightly soggy knish of sentiment.

Like the play, a too-cute intercontinental switch on Abie's Irish Rose, the film tells the story of Bertha Jacoby (Rosalind Russell), an elderly Jewish widow from Brooklyn who takes a trip to Japan. On the boat Bertha meets Koichi Asano (Sir Alec Guinness), a Japanese textile tycoon who has "also hed a cupf'l," as Bertha sympathetically puts it--he lost two children in the war, and his wife died not long after Bertha's Sam passed away ("ective in business to the lest"). What's more, the poor man has a cold. Oy veh! Bertha rushes to the rescue with handy home remedies: "Soap and vater and stewed prunes, and you should gahgle vit hodt vater and peroxide."

How can a lonely old millionaire resist? He invites her to his house in Tokyo for mint tea--"Mm," she says appreciatively, "tastes like hodt possley"--and proposes marriage. Bertha at first demurs, but later Koichi turns up in Brooklyn, and at the fade it looks as if Bertha has acquired a samurai to take the place of Sam.

Majority is much too long (2 hr. 20 min. 30 sec.), and it lacks the kindly, take-a-piece-fruit intimacy of the play. But Actor Guinness breaks out a sensational Tokyo brogue ("Prease feer free to use my country crub") and contrives to seem charmingly inscrutable behind the craziest set of epicanthic folds any actor was ever pasted to--they look like two fat little patties of ravioli hanging from his eyebrows. Actress Russell, humped up and nipped out till she resembles a superannuated ostrich, encompasses quite without caricature the standard repertory of Jewish gesture--the delicately deprecating shrug that says: I don't mean to offend, but a fact is a fact; the vigorous extension of the hands, chest high and palms up, that means: you got problems? / got problems. What Actress Russell fails to reproduce is the special warmth of Jewish motherhood, the Old-Testamental intensity of devotion. She has done a skillful piece of work, but it takes more than skill to turn Auntie Mame into Molly Goldberg.

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