E-Mail This Article to a Friend Venetian bind Radford pounds the flesh in Merchant; plus, The Screening Room returns BY GERALD PEARY

"My mother was Jewish, by the way," said British director Michael Radford, cutting himself some slack in making the first English-language non-TV film of The Merchant of Venice since the sound era and daring to face up to Shakespeare’s alleged anti-Semitism in creating Shylock, the prototypical Jewish villain. But what about directing a Shakespeare drama for the screen, something never attempted before by the Oxford-educated filmmaker of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Il postino/The Postman?

"When I started to adapt the play, I looked at all Shakespeare film adaptations I could find," Radford told me at last September’s Toronto International Film Festival. "I adore Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew even more than his Romeo and Juliet. For me, the best version of Romeo and Juliet is West Side Story. Orson Welles’s Othello? You just don’t care, you don’t give a shit about Othello."

Had he considered setting his Merchant of Venice in more recent times or, with Al Pacino as Shylock, Americanizing it? "No, if you set it in Chicago in the 1920s, make it a gangster play, then why are the characters talking about Venice?" Radford shook his head disapprovingly. "Richard the Third as a Nazi metaphor? You’ve got to feel what Shakespeare felt, so I wanted to set it in Venice [in Elizabethan] time: a very precise backdrop, with a dirty ghetto where they made cannon shot and where they spit at Jews. When Tubal is spat upon, he simply wipes it off and carries on as if nothing had happened. I set the Jewish scenes in front of a bordello. The ghetto had girls with their tits out. People went to the ghetto to have fun.

"There was lots of anti-Semitism then, also lots of tolerance. If I can show this, plus the context of two cultures [Christian and Jewish], then I will have succeeded."

Radford may have intended for his production to feel authentically 16th-century, but the analogies he offers for his movie conception are pop-culture contemporary: "Shylock is like the dad in Bend It like Beckham. His daughter, Jessica, is pissed off at living with a stiff father. When she runs off with a Christian, he regards her as a prostitute. After she leaves, he’s suffering from road rage! The matrix of my movie was Nashville: a bunch of human beings neither good nor bad, and Altman not judgmental."

And what of his ending, in which Jessica, though married to a Christian and living in a Christian culture, still cherishes her father’s turquoise, a Jewish ring? "It’s like the necklace in Titanic. You sense Jessica’s sadness, which explains the silence of Jessica in the last acts."

One would imagine that casting Al Pacino as Shylock might be scary for the director. "I’m never intimidated by an actor," Radford said, "not since I worked with Richard Burton, who could be tough! But every actor needs direction. Once Al knew he could trust me, be on the same page, then I could say anything to him that I wanted to. He’s so intense and neurotic about what he does, he would drive us nuts. He constantly wanted to repeat and repeat things, and I’d want to tell him he’d got it all in take seven.

"He gives himself such pain! But if an actor explodes on the set, I care if it’s about his trailer, his entourage, I don’t care if it’s about his work. With Al, if he got angry at himself because he couldn’t get it right, it’s water off a duck’s back. The electricity he engenders! He worked harder than anybody, for months."

I’D BEEN TEACHING his anthropological masterpiece, Dead Birds, in film classes at Rutgers University. To my amazement, when I moved to Boston in 1978, Robert Gardner had his own regular television program, The Screening Room, on Channel 5. I became a constant viewer, for what was not to like for a film lover? Gardner, who headed the Center for Visual Arts at Harvard, sat in one chair, a filmmaker guest sat in the other, and at their own very leisurely pace, they had a smart, learned conversation about the guest’s career, including samples of the his or her work.

There was no pandering to the TV audience, no agitation to be entertaining. But those who listened intently heard marvelous, magical wisdom about the cinema. Now, 20 of the best Screening Room programs, from 1973 to 1980, are becoming available on DVD through Documentary Educational Resources (www.der.org). I’ve sampled two of them: a talk with the wry, clever animator Robert Breer and a sweet visit with the warm, charming French anthropological filmmaker Jean Rouch. Coming up: Richard Leacock, Yvonne Rainer, Jonas Mekas, and other off-Hollywood luminaries.