The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, January 20-26
Benya Krik (1926)
Directed by Vladimir Vilner
Benya Krik is one fictional avatar of legendary Odessa gangster Mishka Yaponchik, whose adventuring took place in the final days of the Russian Empire, when Odessa was an important port—a proudly cosmopolitan, heavily Jewish city, home also to Isaac Babel, from whose collected Odessa Tales Krik comes. Babel wrote the screenplay for the film, too, adapting two of his Tales and adding an ending in which the Bolsheviks and Krik conclusively don’t get along. Eisenstein was first meant to direct, but couldn’t. In Vladimir Vilner’s version—at least its first two thirds, before things get revolutionary—goats, chickens, horses, wine, whores, drunks, cops and fortune-tellers populate a harsh and seductive realm reigned over by Benya, called the King. This self-made monarch and his court are an anarchic element—thieves with an honor code, polite blackmailers, excellent hosts: a force neither for good nor evil but only for itself. The Soviets couldn’t tolerate it, nor how immensely enjoyable a film it made for—they banned it. Later, Babel was shot. In 2011 an expensive-looking, nostalgia-riding Yaponchik series aired on Russian television. Long live the King, wherever he may be. Elina Mishuris (January 23, 7pm at the New York Jewish Film Festival)