| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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THE ANGEL LEVINE
Rating: 
USA. 1970.
Director – Jan Kadar, Screenplay – Bill Gunn & Ronald Ribman, Based on the Short Story by Bernard Malamud, Producer – Chiz Schultz, Photography (colour + some scenes b&w) – Richard Kratina, Music – Zdenek Liska, Songs – Bob Freedman, Production Design – George Jenkins. Production Company – Belafonte Enterprises.
Cast:
Zero Mostel (Morris Mishkin), Harry Belafonte (Alexander Levine), Ida Kaminska (Fanny Mishkin), Milo O’Shea (Dr Arnold Berg), Gloria Foster (Sally)
Plot: Elderly Jew Morris Mishkin is certain that God hates him because of all the suffering he has experienced in life. He finds a Black man in his kitchen who introduces himself as Alexander Levine and insists that he has been sent back from the dead to help Mishkin. As Mishkin tries to decide whether the frequently less-than-angel-like Levine is genuine or still the petty conman he was in life, Levine proceeds to teach him a series of hard, sharp lessons.
On the face of it it is not that different from the old angelic intervention fantasies of the 1940s a la Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941), An Angel on My Shoulder (1946), Angels in the Outfield (1951). What is unusual is the approach, which makes the sentiments much more hare-edged and embittered. And even more interestingly it portrays the angelic figure with an ambiguity that suggests equally as much he could be only a street-smart hustler, as though to say that the substance of what one believes about Levine rest purely in faith.
Director Jan Kadar and lead actor Zero Mostel play it with an authentic sense of Jewish fatalism, which lends to a nicely downbeat realism to the exercise. But ultimately Kadar’s experimental tricks – flipping back and forward between black-and-white and colour, a zoom-happy lens and a genuinely weird score filled with monotonous atonal rhythms and wails – weakens the narrative to the point of inconsequentiality. A scene like where Levine steals the drug, shot as a bizarre chaotic mime to an even weirder score, really makes wonder exactly what sort of film it is that one has wandered into. And in the end one is not even really sure what all the ambiguity about whether Levine is mortal or divine is ultimately meant to mean – or for that matter if one could really care less. Among the cast Mostel’s wry, fatalistic performance succeeds in being occasionally moving, and the same can be said for Ida Kaminska as Fanny. Gloria Foster is exceptional as the cynical, streetwise Sally – one can see the suspicious distrust in her eyes and yet the willingness at wanting to believe Levine. Harry Belafonte’s bland performance as Levine is the only weak card among the deck, his weakly pained sincerity failing to hit that right note of certainty that would have engendered the role to us.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1992
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