Forgotten Gems of the 60s: Bye Bye Braverman

By the mid 1960s, Sidney Lumet had already established himself as a director of hard-hitting social dramas (12 Angry Men, The Pawnbroker, Fail-Safe), but had never really tried his hand at comedy. 1968's Bye Bye Braverman, a critical and commercial flop, changed all that. A rare film that eluded me for years (it never even found its way to VHS), I was admittedly head-over-heels when I located a Telecine DVD copy on the grey market. Based on Wallace Markfield's cynical novel To an Early Grave, Bye Bye Braverman is one of the most New York City-specific films I've come across — where Manhattan neighborhoods are used to draw subtle distinctions between four nearly identical characters, and where a working knowledge of Brooklyn is virtually a requirement to fully appreciate the film. It also happens to be the most Jewish of New York comedies, to the extent that it makes Woody Allen look like a sheygets. As the film opens, we learn that the titular Braverman has died at the untimely age of forty-one. In the course of a single day, his four oldest friends will meet and embark on an exodus to Brooklyn to attend his funeral. Braverman and his four comrades are all left-leaning intellectuals, though each is slightly past his prime: there's PR man Morroe Rieff (George Siegel), whose first reaction on hearing the news is that Braverman owed him money, East Village poet Barnet Weinstein (Jack Warden), critic and professor of pop-culture Holly Levine (Sorrell Booke), whose latest course is "From Little Nemo to Lil' Abner", and diehard socialist Felix Ottensteen (Joseph Wiseman), who (among other things) lectures on Philip Roth to the Hadassah ladies. Rounding out the cast is Zohra Lampert as Morroe's Stalin-obsessed wife, Jessica Walter (Lucille Bluth from Arrested Development, pictured above) as Braverman's neurotic widow Inez, and Godfrey Cambridge as a taxi driver who just happens to be a converted Jew. Though intellectuals to the core, you wouldn't guess it by outward appearances — these four are schlubs, though loveable. Holly, who Morroe describes as looking like an avant-garde Yul Brynner, is the self-satisfied boaster of the gang ("my piece on John Ford has been twice anthologized!"), yet he's more George Costanza than George S. Kaufman. (Hard to believe this same actor would go on to play Boss Hogg in The Dukes of Hazzard.) He's also the only one with a car, and it's in his cherry red VW Beetle that the four will become a lost tribe of sorts as they unsuccessfully navigate their way through Brooklyn in search of Braverman's funeral. Lumet's travelogue through New York's most populous borough is perhaps a bit self-indulgent, and many might feel the endless shots of brownstones, bodegas, Hasidim, churches, temples and Flatbush Avenue landmarks last longer than necessary, but they serve as a bit of a breather between longer set pieces, including a wonderful philosophical exchange with a cab driver (Godfrey Cambridge) they accidentally collide with. Jokes about death, a staple in Jewish comedy (cf. Woody Allen, Philip Roth), appear throughout the film — the men compare dying young to walking out on a Hitchcock movie in the middle, and Siegel has several waking fantasies about how insignificant his own death will be. A lengthy monologue set amongst a sea of headstones in a non-descript Brooklyn cemetery belongs on any list of great cinematic moments, and the writing brilliantly captures the zeitgeist of the era. The film also pokes fun at reformed Judaism, particularly in the funeral scene with comedian Alan King as a rabbi delivering an epic sermon that says absolutely nothing. He's the embodiment of the type of rabbi that Lenny Bruce called "so reform they're ashamed of being Jewish". More a meditation on friendship and death than a traditional comic escapade, Herb Sargent's screenplay is sharp and uncompromising, with dialog that files fast and furious. Made on a shoestring budget, Lumet's direction does seem less assured than usual — as if he doesn't know what to do with camera during the longer segments — though it in no way diminishes the film's strengths. With an abundance of nostalgia-inducing Manhattan and Brooklyn location scenes, Bye Bye Braverman is a truly unique comedy that you don't have to be a New Yorker to love (but it couldn't hurt.)