Two-Thirds of Greatness

To Aristotle, tragedy's effect was tripartite; it moved from pity to terror to catharsis. By those tenets, as valid as they are venerable, Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer Prize novel The Fixer misses greatness by a third. It has the first two requisites, but it omits any purge of the emotions. Malamud brings his hero, Yakov Bok, to the brink of destruction--or salvation--and freezes the action. There, in Auden's phrase, "the seas of pity lie, locked and frozen in each eye." By definition, the film of The Fixer can aspire to be only two-thirds of a great movie. Still, it has within it an irresistible moral force and an impressive cast of characters who have truly Dostoevskian resonance.

Alan Bates plays Bok--a handyman, a fixer of broken things. His home is the shtetl, a rural Jewish village in 1911 Russia. It is a time of pogroms and malignant rumors of Jews who murder Christians as part of their religious rites. Bok, possessed of a barren, faithless wife (Carol White), abandons his emotions, his conscience and his home. His destination is the ancient Russian Orthodox city of Kiev, where he promptly sends himself to hell by passing as a gentile. In scenes that seem to have emerged from the mainstream of Russian literature, Lebedev (Hugh Griffith), a rabid anti-Semite, makes Bok a trusted employee until Lebedev's daughter Zinaida (Elizabeth Hartman) falsely accuses the fixer of rape. The recriminatory shriek becomes a chorus when religious fanatics also accuse Bok of ritual murder. The fixer is seized and imprisoned. The . machinery of the state begins: moved by a heritage of hate, it tries to grind the fixer to dust.

Shining Interior. Astonishingly, he will not disintegrate, All the degradations, all the tortures will not make him confess to his "crimes." As the universal sufferer, Bates wears the exhausted eyes, the depleted physique, the rime of salt about the parched lips like indestructible medals. In Malamud's view and in Bates' playing, Bok becomes a second Job who grows from suffering to manhood. The fixer finally fixes himself, and, symbolically, all sufferers. Like the book, the film has no end, only a conclusion: there is no such thing as indifference; an abstention from humanity is a vote for evil. When Yakov goes to trial the story halts, as if the future were epilogue. Unfortunately, it is not. Malamud based his novel on the agonies of a real Russian Jew, Mendel Beiliss, who was finally exonerated. Torn between actuality and false doom, The Fixer becomes a victim of artistic indecision.

Because the story has no conventional plot development, it is at its interior that the film shines. In the title role, Bates' indomitable intelligence radiates through the rough peasant vocabulary and makes Yakov too mortal to die.

As a symbol he is perfect; as a Jew he is wanting. Betrayed by his English accent, he cannot articulate inversions like "Luck I was always short of" without seeming to pronounce the quotation marks around the words. His most effective support comes from Dirk Bogarde as Bibikov, the court-assigned defender of the fixer. Wearing a fine mask of melancholy disdain, he grows gradually more revulsed by the corruption he witnesses in the palace of justice; his actions and his death predict the fall of the Romanovs as surely as any Leninist edict.

The Fixer's greatest star is unseen: Director John Frankenheimer. Mixing Chagallic lyricism and Hasidic irony, he has re-created a vanished, almost mythic time and place. Moreover, he has done it under theoretically impossible dramatic conditions. For well over half of the movie, the only event is Ya-kov's painful emergence. Like the hero, the viewer is kept in prison for what seems most of a lifetime, unable to turn away from the degradation on the screen. Like Yakov, he grows used to the pale illumination, the cramped quarters, the dreadful isolation. Toward the close, when the fixer steps briefly into the daylight, the sudden solar glare and the sight of crowds lining the streets have a visceral impact. Such summits give added credence to the growing reputation of one of the very few major American film makers.

Child of a Catholic-Jewish marriage, Frankenheimer, 38, has always been the splitting image of the bright boy who constantly wonders which way to turn. A precocious graduate of a liberal grammar school, a Catholic military school and Williams College, Frankenheimer began making films while in the military. In 1951, the Air Force decided to form a motion picture group in Burbank, Calif.; Frankenheimer signed on. "My director of photography was a guy named Kazumplick," he recalls. "The only meter he knew about was the one a cabbie pushed down. He had volunteered for the thing just to keep out of Korea."

From amateur nights in the Air Force, Frankenheimer moved on to professional evenings at CBS, where he provided some of early TV's finest hour-and-a-halves, including 7 he Turn of the Screw, Faulkner's Old Man and Days of Wine and Roses. Between TV shots he squeezed in his first film, The Young Stranger, then just missed being assigned to Breakfast at Tiffany's--"because," he claims, "Audrey Hepburn never heard of me." Very shortly, she did, along with everybody else. Frankenheimer, with Writer-Producer George Axelrod, raised $70,000 to buy the screen rights for The Manchurian Candidate. He paused, directed Bird Man of Alcatraz with Burt Lancaster and All Fall Down with Warren Beatty, and then turned Candidate into one of the cult films of the '60s. The movie was snubbed by many American critics, but it enjoyed a vogue in Britain and then came back to the U.S. for a reshowing and some enthusiastic reappraisals. With its meticulously planned scenario and adrenal climaxes, it established the vigorous Frankenheimer style. It also revealed the director's curious wavering between the frankly commercial and the experimental exploration of abnormal psychology. Bird Man is about a lifer in Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate about the making of a presidential assassin. His subsequent films show military tyranny (Seven Days in May), war horrors (The Train), Faustian science fiction (Seconds), the self-destructive drive in professional racers (Grand Prix). The Extraordinary Seamen, as yet unreleased, is a capricious satire on war. The Gypsy Moths, to be released next year, is about the personal and professional hang-ups of daredevil sky divers.

From the beginning, Frankenheimer has never been Mr. Sunshine on the set. Standing 6 ft. 3 in. and weighing in at 185 Ibs., he looms over most of his actors and technicians both physically and emotionally. He kept a toy cannon out of sight on the Manchurian set, and shot it off whenever he wanted a special on-camera flinch from Laurence Harvey. "A director has to be ruthless sometimes to get an effect," admits Frankenheimer. "To get those few seconds of screen time, almost anything goes."

When he is not moving actors and cameras around, Frankenheimer withdraws to his Malibu Beach house like one of his hypersensitive characters. After more than six years of analysis and two unsuccessful marriages--his third wife is Actress Evans Evans--he tends to relax only among close friends. Besides, the stuff of scenarios keeps crossing his life. A year after The Manchurian Candidate was released, John Kennedy was shot; the long-range rifle, the mother-fixated assassin, the public murder in the movie, all had eerie parallels in real life. The scene of the spectacular car crash in Grand Prix was staged by the racer Lorenzo Bandini. A year later he died in a pile-up at the same corner. In Los Angeles this year, Frankenheimer was just finishing a film about his house guest when he learned that the guest--Bobby Kennedy--had been assassinated.

His response, typically, was withdrawal--but isolation to Frankenheimer is like a full business week for most of his colleagues. Although he is currently between filmings, he is editing one movie and having scripts completed on four others. In his spare time, he allows himself some jitters of insecurity. "My fear in life is getting hung up on a style," he says. "I don't want to be as prolific as Godard, but I would like to make an average of H films a year. If I made one film every two years, I'd get too careful. I don't want to function that way; I'm still learning a hell of a lot."

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