Jacob the Liar

Before the Robin Williams vanity remake -- reportedly a Holocaust movie with a heinous merry ending -- creeps into our theaters, Jacob the Liar, the sublime original, plays once, and only once, at the Coolidge Corner this Wednesday evening. Don't miss this joint benefit for the Coolidge and the Boston Jewish Film Festival. Frank Beyer's extraordinary East German film got an Oscar nomination in 1977 for Best Foreign Film, and it remains one of the few films to show how you can dramatize the Holocaust and not debase what happened.

The action takes place in a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, where everyone is waiting for a miracle invasion by the Red Army. Meanwhile, the citizenry are being deported, street by street, and placed in cattle cars. Well, there's one nibble of hope: a middle-aged, scrubby-bearded guy named Jacob is whispering it about that he has a forbidden radio, and occasionally he passes on to his friends an iota of "news" indicating that the Jews have not been forgotten. Also, Jacob is taking care of a little orphan girl; and, hiding from her vision, he acts out radio voices so that she thinks she's listening to an actual broadcast.

Enter Roberto Benigni: he clearly stole this conceit, the beautiful lie to a child, and made it the shameless center of Life Is Beautiful. Enter Robin Williams: the chance to do that ghetto radio shtick, Putz Adams style!!! Stick with the original Jacob the Liar, a movie of heart and soul that's never sentimental and certainly never "feel-good" and that has at its center a great performance by Vlastimil Brodsky as Jacob, without mugging or artifice.

-- Gerald Peary