Skokie Reviews

Here is a great snippet from an interview with Danny.
This article is listed under the Articles & Interviews section.

Kaye’s performance is fiery, even fierce, so much so that it’s easy to believe he’s spilling out his own personal feelings through the character. [“Danny Kaye Plays Role of Holocaust Survivor” Oct.1981]

*     *     *

The following reviews are listed in chronological order.

The parts referring specifically to Danny appear in yellow.

“‘Skokie’ Examines Free Speech Question”
Harlan Daily Enterprise – Nov. 14, 1981
By: Jerry Buck (AP Television Writer)

           LOS ANGELES (AP) – The TV movie “Skokie” examines the still-unresolved perimeters of First Amendment guarantees of free speech raised three years ago in the Chicago suburb.
            The 2-hour CBS movie looks at the tense confrontation that resulted when a group of American Nazis proposed to march in Skokie—a community that includes a number of Nazi death camp survivors.
            It was a see-saw battle for nearly two years. Skokie was determined to keep the Nazis out. And the Nazis, who unexpectedly found the American Civil Liberties Union in their corner, were as determined to march.
            It all boiled down to this question: Can the constitutional guarantees of free speech for an individual—no matter how reprehensible his beliefs—be deprived to protect the well-being of the community?
          “Skokie,” which stars Danny Kaye, John Rubinstein, Carl Reiner, Kim Hunter, and Eli Wallach, with a special appearance by Lee Strasberg, considers that question and the emotion it evokes. It also looks at the many levels of the controversy which cut across religious, legal, political and family lines. In some cases it was Jew against Jew.
          The movie, which CBS will broadcast Tuesday night, succeeds admirably in presenting this controversy in an enlightening and entertaining manner.
            “Danny surprised everybody,” said Reiner, who plays Abbot Rosen of the Anti-Defamation League. “He came on the set looking like Danny Kaye. He didn’t do anything special except put on a suit that didn’t fit him very well. He really committed himself. My hair stood on end when he talked about his mother.”
            Kaye’s character of Max Feldman is a composite of various survivors of the Holocaust. He is an obstinate man, and it is his anguished protest at a synagogue meeting that leads to the confrontation. He says at the end, “This time I didn’t let them step on me. This time I didn’t let them spit on me. This time I didn’t let them kill me.”
            His wife, played by Miss Hunter, is paralyzed by a feeling of utter hopelessness and fear and withdraws to seek solace in classical music. Their daughter, played by Marin Kanter, had been shielded from the horrors of the Holocaust by her parents. She is at first bewildered, then comes to feel, in her words, “I am living in two worlds.”
            Reiner said he had been worried about the casting of Kaye in the “Skokie” role. “Somehow I felt he wouldn’t dedicate himself to immersing himself in another character,” he said. “Letting Danny Kaye disappear. But I didn’t see any comedic character, the angularity when he’s doing comedy. He reached back into his Jewish background.”

“‘Skokie’ provides fine drama along with meaningful message”
Star-News – Nov. 17, 1981
By: Judy Flander
(© 1981 Judy Flander)

            WASHINGTON – In a season of mediocre made-for-TV movies, CBS’s Skokie (at 8) is a standout. A blend of docu-drama and human drama, it prods disturbingly into the American consciousness and, despite some of the slime that oozes out, it reveals on balance the best in our democracy.
           Skokie is a movie to make you think, to make you squirm, to make you proud.
            Danny Kaye’s performance as the militant survivor of a Nazi concentration camp is the best in his career. He is able to make you forget that he is a brilliant comic whose gift for mimicry and linguistic acrobatics has never been excelled.
            Kaye plays Max Feldman, a man determined to prevent a Nazi group from marching in his neighborhood. “We will not just pull down the shades,” he says, incredulous that others do not see the issue as he does.
            “The Nazis are coming here to say they can kill the Jews.”
            And that’s exactly what “the Nazis”—a small but foreboding band of hoods led by a creepy Frank Collin—plan to do under the cloak of the First Amendment, freedom of speech. George Dzundza’s Colin is a masterpiece of controlled malevolence.
            The reaction of Max Feldman and his wife Bertha (Kim Hunter) and their troubled daughter Janet (Marin Kanter) is undercut with the scenes of the legal maneuvering of the Skokie town fathers, as determined as Feldman to keep the Nazis out.
            What gave the case the most unexpected drama was that Collin was the client of the American Civil Liberties Union. And the ACLU lawyer who handled it was Jewish, as were many supporters of the organization. At the time, the ACLU lost plenty of members; Skokie will probably further decimate their ranks.
            John Rubinstein plays the ACLU lawyer with the big dilemma. Someone asks him why he chose “to take on a pathological anit-Semite as a client” and he replies, “The Constitution is a client.” It does not have to be pointed out to him, however, how “monumentally improper it is for a Jewish lawyer” to be in his position.
            The legal drama is fascinating and fastidiously follows the original event. The Feldman family drama is agonizing. Hunter, as the wife who takes to her bed and listens to classical music to shut out the past and ignore the present, is extraordinary.
            “Don’t stuff your ears with music,” Feldman tells his wife in the movie’s most powerful scene. “What is the use of surviving if you refuse to learn?”
            Except for a couple of over-wrought performances by bit players, the acting in Skokie is uniformly convincing.
            In the end, nobody wins and everybody wins, but the last voice is that of Max Feldman: “We were witnesses,” he said. But in another generation most of the witnesses will be gone.”

- Home -