TCM last December ran a series of movies that dealt with themes of divine intervention. One that was new to me was The Angel Levine. Once again, since the synopsis sounded interesting, I decided to record it and eventually got around to watching it not long before it expired from my DVR.
Zero Mostel stars as Morris Mishkin, a quintessentially Jewish character, although that's not surprising considering that this is based on a short story by Bernard Malamud. Mishkin is a tailor who's got a mess of a life as his business had dried up; his daughter married out of the faith which in some ways destroyed him; and his wife Fanny (Ida Kaminska) is bedridden with a heart condition. To make matters worse, as Morris is in a delicatessen buying food for him and his wife, he sees a woman getting her coat stolen! Morris points out the thief, who promptely runs out of the deli and gets hit by a car in the middle of the street, dying on the scene.
Then, when Morris gets back to the apartment, his wife suffers another attack of her heart ailment, causing Morris to call for Dr. Berg (Milo O'Shea). It's all enough for a man to lose his faith, and Morris wonders to God why God has forsaken him. Morris can't even get help from the civil authorities in the form of the welfare office where he goes looking for help.
And then, while Morris is waiting for Dr. Berg to show up, Morris goes into the kitchen and finds -- a black man! This being New York circa 1970, when New York was on the trajectory to where a few years later Gerald Ford would tell the city to drop dead, Morris comes to the perfectly logical conclusion that this guy is somebody who's come to rob the house. But the man claims to be Alexander Levine (Harry Belafonte), an angel in training sent by God as divine intervention for Morris. Alexander has died recently (and in fact is the thief killed at the beginning of the movie), and is supposed to perform a miracle. Not that Morris believes this. And when Dr. Berg shows up, he can't see Alexander. And yet, Fanny seems to have had a sudden improvement to the point that Dr. Berg wonders why Morris would have called him.
Things continue like this, with Morris always uncertain whether Levine is or is not in fact an angel. Complicating matters is that Levine had a life of his own before he got hit by that car and killed. Levine had a girlfriend Sally (Gloria Foster), who doesn't know that he has been hit by a car and killed. But their relationship has been difficult, and Sally wasn't certain whether she wanted to continue it anyway. As for Morris, he still isn't certain whether Levine is an angel and whether he can perform a miracle, especially when Fanny has another relapse.
I have to point out that I haven't read the original Malamud story, so I can't comment on how much the story was changed when it was adapted for the big screen. What I can say is that the premise is certainly interesting, but the execution doesn't quite work. I think that's mostly the result of the screenplay. I'm not the biggest fan of Harry Belafonte, and as I've pointed out he's generally been the weak point in the movies that I've seen. THat's not the case here, however. He, Mostel, and Kaminska all do well, or at least as well as can be expected considering the script really letting things down in the second half of the movie.
One other interesting thing is that when this was shown on TCM, Ben Mankiewicz made certain to point out that Zero Mostel had fallen afoul of the Hollywood blacklist. However, while he pointed out that the movie's director Ján Kadár was Slovak and had directed The House on Main Street, he didn't point out that Kadár wound up in Hollywood because he was more or less blacklisted by the Czechoslovak communists after the Soviet invasion of 1968. Apparently some blacklists are OK for Ben Mankiewicz.
