BYE, BYE BRAVERMAN

US, 1967, 93 minutes, Colour.
George Segal, Jack Warden, Joseph Wiseman, Sorrell Booke, Godfrey Cambridge, Jessica Walter, Phyllis Newman, Zohra Lampert, Alan King.
Directed by Sidney Lumet.

Bye, Bye Braverman is a wry comedy about Jews in New York. Sidney Lumet, three years earlier, had given the world a suffering Jew in New York, Sol Nazermann, The Pawnbroker. Now he shows us the ordinary, the human side of the Jews in a comedy that is touching, funny and sad. These Jews are American Jews with their characteristic ways of expressing themselves and modulation. They have been born and have grown up in New York, are now in middle age and one of their friends has died. We catch them on a Sunday in the middle of life, see them meet one another again and then part. These vignettes of life are excellent and help us to understand ordinary men better. At times the comedy becomes farcical, but by and large this is a comedy about life and death.

Sidney Lumet (with Boris Kaufman as his director of photography) has filmed often in New York - The Pawnbroker, The Group, The Anderson Tapes, Dog Day Afternoon. Here the city is one of the characters as well. The humour might be too localised for many audiences, but for those who like an intelligent comedy, this is worthwhile.

1. Was this film too narrow in its range, interest and humour for a general audience? Was it made rather for a Jewish audience?

2. What dimension did the stills behind the opening credits give to the film ?children growing up in a particular period in New York?

3. We are told that New York is where Leslie Braverman's friends live. How did the New York environment come across in the film, its details, its moods e.g. on the way to the funeral?

4. The film was about a cross-section of ordinary men: man, Jewish, New Yorker, American. What did the film tell you about each? Morrie, middle aged fundraiser, his wife and clashes, Inez, too soft, his imagination (he is always dead and wanting to be thought well of). How friendly was he to Leslie Braverman? Why did he want to go to his funeral? The reaction of Inez and her child. Holly Levine, how was he being satirised, what was being satirised? He is clean but sterile, no wife, uncreative, fastidious, pedantic? Felix, Jewish-conscious, grudges, self-made man, self-centred against his wife and son, his treatment of his son and lack of sympathy, unimaginative, his anti-German remarks, his speaking to God? Why did he like Leslie Braverman? the sociologist, intelligent, using jargon in his relationships with his girlfriend, his remarks about his mother, selfish and calculating, yet pleasant, his relationship to his girlfriend? Why did he like Leslie Braverman?

5. What was the effect of death on each of the friends? What did they first think of e.g. Morroe and the $137? friendship, the return to the past, themselves and their lives (and death)?

6. Why did Morroe not succeed in making communication with the men on the bus? Why was he successful only in his imagination - the men on the bus, the Rabbi, his wife and the tombstone?

7. How did the four friends communicate with one another - their conversation and banter in the car?

8. What was the significance of Holly's hitting the cab and the dialogue with the cab driver? What point was made in this sequence?

9. Did you like the funeral sequence? What points were being nude about death, life, grief? Why did the friends react as they did? What was the point of the Rabbi's talk?

10. What was the significance of the sequence in the cemetery, their discussion about the living and the dead, Morroe's soliloquy surrounded by headstones? Did he explain himself and his life well?

11. How did they all feel as they went home? What bonds had been broken? How had they realised that time was passing and they were changing and getting older?

12. What was the significance of Morroe's return home and the talk about the jello? Why did he cry at the end? Whom for? Why was the final still shown at the end?

13. How did the music contribute to the mood of the film?

14. Why was this comedy made? Did it help you to understand human nature better?