Did you live in New York in the 1960s?

Another of the movies that I recorded because of its interesting synopsis was Bye Bye Braverman. I had seen a review or two before watching it that indicated the movie had sharply divided opinions on it, and now that I've watched it, I can see why.

Morroe Rieff (George Segal) is a Jewish PR man living with his wife (Zohra Lampert) in an apartment in Manhattan's Upper East Side. One day, he gets a phone call from Inez Braverman (Jessica Walter) informing him that her husband died suddenly of a heart attack at the tender age of 41. Jewish tradition has it that the funeral is supposed to take place as soon as is practical (I'd guess that thousands of years ago, in the desert without any form of preservation, it was important to bury bodies as quickly as possible, and making that a religious commandment would make it more likely that people keep following it), so Mrs. Braverman informs Rieff that the funeral is going to be later that day, in a funeral home out in Brooklyn on Ocean Parkway. You can't miss the place.

Of course, you can miss the place, but we're getting ahead of ourselves in the story. Morroe calls some of his best friends, those who were mutual friends with Braverman. They hail from different parts of Manhattan, but agree to go to the funeral together. Those friends are, like Braverman, all intellectuals of a sort: Weinstein (Jack Warden), an academic writer; Ottensteen (Joseph Wiseman), a writer of fiction; and Holly Levine (Sorrell Booke), who writes book reviews. Holly is the one with a car, a practical -- but German (gasp!) -- Volkswagen Beetle, so the four men will all load themselves into his car for the drive to Brooklyn.

Of course, the drive to the funeral is not uneventful. There's a lot of the pseudo-intellectual banter you might expect from four white-collar men, punctuated by Holly's annoyance at having a bunch of back-seat drivers. More noteworthy would be a fender-bender they get into with a taxi driver (Godfrey Cambridge), who turns out to be a black Jew and, despite his driving a taxi, being as much of a pseudo-intellectual as the rest of them.

Eventually they get to a funeral home, where the rabbi (Alan King) is delivering a long-winded and equally pseudo-intellectual sermon. Of course, the point of all this, at least in terms of the movie's entertainment value, is that the posturing is supposed to be funny and lead to a reflection on life.

Now, whether or not you get that humor depends, I think, on how much you can identify with the characters and their milieu. I'm not Jewish and I'm also not an urbanite, so I have to admit that I didn't identify with them to the extent that people who like this movie do. I can see why some people would, and I can certainly see why director Sidney Lumet would have been attracted to the material, since his father was part of the Yiddish theater in New York back in the 1920s and 1930s. Other people, however, may find it a slog.

So Bye Bye Braverman is more than a lot of others the sort of thing where you have to watch and draw your own judgment.