To immerse yourself in the youthful, bustling Israel shown by Sallah, you have to set aside the country's turbulent history over the decades since 1949, when the story takes place, and 1964, when the picture premiered. That means temporarily forgetting Israel's rapid economic growth, the travails of the Six-Day War and other conflicts, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and so much else, not to mention the chaos and violence afflicting much of the Middle East today. In return the movie gives you a mildly humorous, gently nostalgic tour of a nation with modest resources at the moment but great expectations for the future.

The film's original title was Sallah Shabati, which is the protagonist's name. It's an amusing name, since it sounds like a Hebrew phrase meaning "sorry I came," and that describes the feelings of the character, a newly arrived Yemeni immigrant starting to wonder if immigrating was a good idea. He has a big family, with so many children (seven, plus one on the way) that he can't always get the number straight. It isn't clear just why they came in the first place - there's no sign that Sallah and his wife are Zionists, for instance - but they definitely thought their adopted country would give them all a comfy, modern home. Instead they're plunked into a single room in a Ma'abara, or settlement camp, that's the opposite of modern and couldn't be less comfy. Why can't they live in an airy kibbutz or a nice apartment in the nearby housing development? They're stuck where they are until Sallah solves this problem.

As heroes go, however, Sallah is not very heroic. He wants a decent life for his little brood, and he knows that putting some money in his pocket would be a good step in this direction. But what he doesn't want to do is put in an honest day's work. Instead he whiles away the hours playing a kind of backgammon called sheshbesh and doing occasional odd jobs, such as lugging a large wardrobe cabinet to a kibbutz official's home. He also pulls off schemes and scams, as when he manages to sell his vote to no fewer than five political parties in a local election. And he intercedes in the romances of his oldest children, daughter Habbubah and his son Shimmon, both of whom rile him up by falling in love with kibbutzniks. When things turn out well for the family in the end, it's because Sallah got better at wheeling and dealing, not because he saw the error of his ways and started doing his fair share for society.

Sallah was written and directed by the enormously popular social satirist Ephraim Kishon, a Hungarian Jew and committed Zionist who emigrated to Israel in 1949 after surviving a series of Nazi concentration camps and rejecting Hungary's postwar Communist regime. (Upon arriving in Israel, it's interesting to note, he lived in a transit camp, a kibbutz, and a housing project like the ones in the movie.) He had published many books and plays by 1964, but Sallah was his first cinematic effort, and it kicked off his film career with a flourish.

According to Kishon's own account, Israeli critics hated Sallah so intensely that they walked out before the screening was over, and his own wife called it an embarrassment when she saw it. Audiences felt differently, however. The picture started breaking box-office records the moment it opened, selling 1,300,000 tickets in a country with a total population of 2,500,000 people. It also fared well in Europe, opening and closing the Berlinale Film Festival, and in the United States, where it earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign-Language Film (losing to Vittorio De Sica's comedy Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1963) and shared the Golden Globe in that category with an Italian comedy and a British drama. Kishon's screenplay and Topol's portrayal of Sallah garnered Golden Gate Awards at the San Francisco filmfest, and the picture played in New York for months on end. Kishon went on to make four additional movies in the 1960s and 1970s, winning another Oscar nomination and Golden Globe along the way. Sallah also launched the career of Menahem Golan, who produced hundreds of pictures in subsequent decades.

Another beneficiary of the film's success was Israeli actor Chaim Topol, credited here as Haym Topol and billed in most of his movies by his last name only. He's best known for the hit musical Fiddler on the Roof, where he played the milkman Tevye in the first London stage production and the film version directed by Norman Jewison in 1971, for which Topol earned an Oscar nomination. Sallah gives him a similar chance to display his talent for portraying men far older than himself; from the look of things you'd never guess he was 29 here, or 35 when he played old Tevye on screen.

Otherwise, though, there aren't many likenesses between Fiddler on the Roof, a warm and folksy romp, and Sallah, a mordant satire of social, cultural, and political foibles. Kishon won the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement in 2002, winning praise for his skill at deploying razor-sharp humor to expose and explore very real problems in Israeli life, including those that accompanied the birth pains of the country's early years. The comedy in Sallah isn't actually all that funny, and today's viewers are likely to agree with the New York Times critic who called the film "more educational than hilarious," adding that while Sallah and company are "an unusual, endearing, often colorful lot," the humor they offer is "largely rudimentary." As a time-machine trip to the early days of modern Israel, however, the movie is quite an experience.

Director: Ephraim Kishon
Producer: Menahem Golan
Screenplay: Ephraim Kishon
Cinematographers: Floyd Crosby, Nissim Leon
Film Editing: Danny Shick, Jacques Erlich, Roberto Cinquini
Art Direction: Joseph Carl
Music: Yohanan Zaray
With: Haym Topol (Sallah Shabati), Gila Almagor (Bathsheva Sosialit), Geula Noni (Habbubah Shabati), Arik Einstein (Ziggi), Zaharira Harifai (Frieda), Shraga Friedman (Neuman), Shaike Levi (Shimon Shabati), Nathan Meisler (Goldstein), Esther Greenberg (Mrs. Shabati)
BW-110m.

by David Sterritt