What happens when two antithetical worlds collide? Different languages, experiences, values, mentalities can spell disaster. Or, as in the case of Analyze This, crackling comedy. Of course, it helps if the Mafia don suddenly unable to whack an enemy is played by Robert De Niro, and if the extremely reluctant therapist whose services he enlists is Billy Crystal. Even the mere juxtaposition of Mafia lingo and Freudian jargon is good for tremors worthy of a minor earthquake.
Take this exchange. Mafia capo Vitti: "If you turn me into a fag, you die!" Therapist Ben Sobol: "Could we define 'fag'?" Vitti (emphatically): "I go fag, you die." Or take the moment when the rival don, Primo Sindone (Chazz Palminteri), told that the situation needs closure, instructs a henchman: "You get a dictionary and find out what dis f---ing closure is!" Or, when Vitti is told about his Oedipus complex, "Dis Freud was a sick f---. I don't want to hear any more filth about my mother."
It all begins when Sobol accidentally rams a Mafia car, whose trunk springs open to reveal a bound and gagged, squirming victim. The trunk is instantly shut and taped down, but the stunned yet conscientious Sobol proffers his card, so as to be charged with the repair expenses. This card enables Paul's bodyguard, Jelly, to direct the panic-ridden boss to Sobol's office, where he immediately usurps the shrink's comfortable armchair. "When I got into family therapy," Ben bemoans, "this was not the Family I had in mind."
Analyze This was written by Peter Tolan, who comes out of television; Kenneth Lonergan, the gifted playwright whose This Is Our Youth is a hit on the New York stage; and Harold Ramis, the film's director, best remembered for his droll Groundhog Day. Aside from a few slow patches, they have contrived a good many scenes and numerous one-liners funnier than any I have caught on film since . . . I can't remember, it's been so long.
De Niro, the beloved tough guy, started out comic in Brian De Palma's Hi, Mom!, and periodically proved himself adept at farce, from the underrated King of Comedy to the overrated Wag the Dog. But you have seldom seen him as rubber-faced as when Ben asks whether anyone has ever said no to him; only, he answers, in combination with such phrases as "Please don't kill me!" He illustrates this with facial accordion effects to do a shar-pei proud.
Crystal is just as amusing as the stuffy yet overeager (to get rid of Vitti) therapist, except in some scenes of the routine subplot about his engagement to a TV newscaster (Lisa Kudrow, in a part no one could wholly salvage). This engagement is an interruptus writ large as Ben is hauled off in the middle of the night or from his own wedding ceremony to provide instant therapy for Vitti. The internecine warfare between Paul's and Primo's Mafia factions is also, in both senses, hit-or-miss. But any scene with Ben, Paul, and Paul's sidekick Jelly (the terrific Joe Viterelli, fat and hangdog-faced, but quick with a quip or a handgun) is undiluted fun. Much of it, to be sure, is in the delivery. I can't affirm that the answer to "What kind of sandwich isn't too fattening?" -- "Half a sandwich" -- would be as savory from a mouth other than Viterelli's.
I am told that Analyze This resembles TV's The Sopranos. I can't say just how they compare, but the film hits enough high notes to warrant a speedy revisit.
Joseph Vilsmaier's The Harmonists, from Germany, is the more or less true story of the Comedian Harmonists, six young Berliners who, in 1927, decide to start a close-harmony ensemble spiced with comedy. Harry Frommermann, an impecunious drama student reduced to filching peanuts from his pet parrot, advertises for young singers and, times being hard, an endless line promptly forms. How the five others were recruited, and their difficulties in finding the right syncopated style and a willing agent, is told with humor and even suspense by Vilsmaier, who both photographed and directed from a script by Klaus Richter.
There is genuine feeling for the fine, old-fashioned pop songs, and a skillfully applied shorthand for characterizing the Comedian Harmonists with terse pungency. There is Harry, the nice Jewish boy who faithfully visits his parents' grave to discuss his problems; Robert Biberti, the arrogant blond Aryan with a booming bass and shrewd business sense; Roman Cycowski, a displaced Polish opera singer and the group's conciliator; Erich Collin, a monocled baptized Jew with the bearing of a Prussian aristocrat; Ari Leschnikoff, a thickly accented Bulgarian- born waiter whose tenor voice women fall for; and the pianist Erwin Bootz, a sleepyhead who must be dragged from his lady's bed.
Already the opening sequence is splendidly managed -- the last minutes before and first minutes after a Harmonists' concert. Both the frantic backstage bustle and the growing expectancy in the slowly filling hall are conveyed with a keen eye for detail, expert crosscutting, and a true sense of musical rhythm translated into the rhythm of cinema. When the group, immaculate in tails, takes the stage to sing the first of several charming numbers we get in the course of the movie, our fulfillment is overwhelming.
There are nice detours into the private lives of the group. Thus Cycowski literally bumps into a girl dancer, Mary, during an audition for the mighty impresario Erik Charell, as the boys are rushing onstage, and some girls off. Their love affair, his hard demand that she convert to Judaism, and their exuberant Jewish wedding are among the film's highlights. No less striking is Collin's finding a French bride among the whores of the bordello where the Harmonists seek shelter for their often stormy rehearsals. Or Bootz's cowardly dumping of his wife for being Jewish.
But the main love story is Frommermann and Biberti's competing for Erna Eggstein, an eternal history student doing her homework while employed in a Jewish music store, where the young men come calling on her. One of them, Hans, a fellow student and future Nazi, will be the cause of considerable trouble.
The real drama is, of course, political, and involves the ever sterner pressure from Nazi authorities on the Harmonists to replace their three Jewish members with Aryans. They ignore such demands and go on to ever greater international success, with Nazi bigwigs often applauding in the front rows and silencing lesser Nazis trying to disrupt the concert from the balcony. One of their biggest fans, the film claims, was the notorious Julius Streicher, later editor of the viciously anti-Semitic Der Stürmer, who invites the group to his house to sing German folksongs, a request that they daringly refuse to comply with. This and a few other incidents were questioned by the historian Peter Gay in a New York Times article.
Further high spots are the Harmonists' concert on a U.S. aircraft carrier in New York Harbor and their subsequent debate about whether to stay on in America, with Harry losing out to Robert, who argues the immunity of their group as an important propaganda weapon for German culture, and refuses to abandon his aged mother back home. I must also mention the group's farewell concert in Munich, fictionalized but very moving, as is also the closing scene at the Berlin train station, as the emigrating Jewish members bid goodbye to the Aryans staying on.
The performances are all exemplary, including those of some grand old German stars in supporting parts. The songs and production numbers are delightful, although the lyrics, like much of the dialogue, lose something in translation. But what remains is more than enough.
If you have access to Broadway, there is, currently and coincidentally, a show about the Comedian Harmonists, Banned in Berlin. It is not much of a play, but you can hear many more of the Harmonists' numbers nicely simulated by a group calling itself Hudson Shad.
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