FESTIVAL SCREENINGS
WORLD PREMIERE Jerusalem International Film Festival (July, 2010)
Moishe Oysher plays Leo, a German concentration camp survivor suffering from traumatic amnesia. In America, Leo works as a hotel clerk next door to Luli’s Gypsy Paradise, a nightclub where he is befriended by comedian Joey Napoleon (borsht belter Joey Adams). One night the two get tipsy and Leo bursts into song. “Leo the Fabulous” becomes Luli’s headliner—although he can only sing when intoxicated. Meanwhile Leo’s visits to a psychiatrist brings forth fragmented memories of his cantor father (shown in flashback with Oysher playing his father singing Hebrew cantorial music). When gangsters looking for Napoleon knock Leo unconscious, his memory finally returns and Oysher is shown singing in the bombed-out ruins of Berlin’s Neue Synagogue, poignant scenes shot on location in Berlin in 1955.
This important and little known film is one of the first American features to dramatize the Holocaust and only the second to depict a holocaust survivor (called “refugee” as the film predates the use of the term “survivor”) as the main protagonist. The film represents an early attempt to integrate the Holocaust into mainstream popular culture using American movie conventions of the period. Singing in the Dark is a quirky mix of 1950s American film genres—the musical, gangster and mystery movie—and the period’s fascination with psychiatry. While Jews are not discussed directly, Jewish content is explicit, especially in the popular Yiddish songs (sung in English) and liturgical Hebrew songs.
Singing in the Dark stars Moishe Oysher, the enormously popular entertainer and star of the Yiddish film classics The Cantor’s Son, Overture to Glory, and The Singing Blacksmith, films previously restored by NCJF. Singing in the Dark, Oysher’s last, was his only English-language film. Director Max Nosseck, a lauded German Jewish silent film director who immigrated to the US in the 1930s, helmed more than 30 films in Germany, France, Spain, Portugal and the US. Singing in the Dark’s producer and co-star Joey Adams, was a borsht belt Jewish comedian and television personality.
Singing in the Dark was shot by Academy Award-winner Boris Kaufman, one of cinema’s revered cinematographers. The younger brother of Soviet cinema innovators Mikhail Kaufman and Dziga Vertov, Kaufman shot groundbreaking films for Jean Vigo in Paris in the early 1930s and, later, such American classics as Splendor in the Grass, 12 Angry Men and The Pawnbroker. For Singing in the Dark, Kaufman shot magnificent material on location in post war Berlin and of the remains of Berlin’s Neue Synagogue (New Synagogue)—a significant Jewish landmark both before and after WWII. The film also includes great footage of New York’s Rivington Street Synagogue.
Restoration with funding from
Linda Lipsett and Jules Bernstein
KodakWith additional support from
Wellfleet Foundation
Brandeis University
Massachusetts Cultural Council
The National Center for Jewish Film’s Reel FundersSpecial thanks
Saul Jeffee, Movielab, Inc.
Hila Feil and Gerald Feil, ASC
Back
to Top
