Larchmont Temple Film Festival
Sundays at 4:00 PM in the Grant Conference Room
In memory and in honor of the silver screen’s legendary Jewish star Kirk Douglas… Rarely screened and mostly forgotten, this was Kirk Douglas’ and Stanley Kramer’s 1953 celebration of the birth of the state of Israel, as well as a memorial of the Holocaust, a term that was not yet used to describe the Nazi’s slaughter of six million Jews.
In a recent article in the Forward, Henry Sapoznik writes: “The obituaries of Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas uniformly recount some of Douglas’s—and Hollywood’s—greatest films: Spartacus, Paths Of Glory, Out Of the Past, Ace In the Hole, Lust For Life.
“Yet, when I think of a quintessential Kirk Douglas film, it is not any of those, but his now largely forgotten 1953 Holocaust/ Halutz (Israeli pioneer) themed film The Juggler….this was Jewish producer Stanley Kramer’s second film, following his 1952 hit High Noon…This was not only the first film to conflate Holocaust atrocities and the promise of Jewish healing in the newly formed state of Israel, but–thanks to Kramer’s passion for verisimilitude—also the first Hollywood film to shoot in Israel. Douglas plays Hans Muller, a Jewish Munich native, who had been a celebrated and beloved juggler but whose concentration camp experience had emotionally crippled him (early in the film at the Haifa disembarkation, he accosts a woman and her children insisting they were his family, despite knowing his family was murdered.” We are proud to screen The Juggler, a film of historical importance starring a Jewish superstar that never forgot his heritage! Refreshments will be served.
