Portnoy's Complaint (film)
Encyclopedia
Portnoy's Complaint is a 1972
1972 in film
The year 1972 in film involved some significant events.-Top grossing films :- Awards :Academy Awards:*Avanti!, directed by Billy Wilder, starring Jack Lemmon and Juliet MillsB...

 American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 dramedy film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

 written and directed by Ernest Lehman
Ernest Lehman
Ernest Lehman was an American screenwriter. He received 6 Academy Award nominations during his screenwriting career...

. His screenplay
Screenplay
A screenplay or script is a written work that is made especially for a film or television program. Screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of writing. In them, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated...

 is based on the bestselling 1969 novel of the same name
Portnoy's Complaint
Portnoy's Complaint is the American novel that turned its author Philip Roth into a major celebrity, sparking a storm of controversy over its explicit and candid treatment of sexuality, including detailed depictions of masturbation using various props including a piece of liver...

 by Philip Roth
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...

.

Plot synopsis

The film focuses on the trials and tribulations of Alexander Portnoy, a Jewish man employed as the assistant commissioner of human opportunity for New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. During a session with his psychoanalyst
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...

, he explores his childhood, his relationship with his overbearing mother, his sexual fantasies and desires, his problems with women, and his obsession with his own religion. Via flashback
Flashback (narrative)
Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...

s, we learn about his affairs with Bubbles Girardi, the daughter of a local hoodlum; Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

i Naomi; and shiksa
Shiksa
Shiksa or shikse, is a Yiddish and Polish word that has moved into English usage, mostly in North American Jewish culture, as a term for a non-Jewish woman, initially and sometimes still pejorative but now often used satirically...

 Mary Jane Reid, whose nickname "Monkey" reflects her remarkable agility at achieving a variety of sexual positions. Mary Jane seemingly is the girl of Portnoy's dreams, but as their relationship deepens and she begins to pressure him into giving her a ring, he shrinks from making a permanent commitment to her.

Principal cast

  • Richard Benjamin
    Richard Benjamin
    Richard Benjamin is an American actor and film director. He has starred in a number of productions, including Goodbye, Columbus , based on the novella by Philip Roth, and Westworld .-Life and career:...

     ..... Alexander Portnoy
  • Karen Black
    Karen Black
    Karen Black is an American actress, screenwriter, singer, and songwriter. She is noted for appearing in such films as Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Great Gatsby, Rhinoceros, The Day of the Locust, Nashville, Airport 1975, and Alfred Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot...

     ..... Mary Jane Reid
  • Lee Grant
    Lee Grant
    Lee Grant is an American stage, film and television actress, and film director. She was blacklisted for 12 years from film work beginning in the mid-1950s, but worked in the theatre, and would eventually win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Felicia Carp in the...

     ..... Sophie Portnoy
  • Jack Somack ..... Jack Portnoy
  • Renée Lippin ..... Hannah Portnoy
  • Jeannie Berlin
    Jeannie Berlin
    Jeannie Berlin is an American film, television and stage actress.Berlin was born Jeannie Brette May in Los Angeles, California to Marvin May and actress/comedian/screenwriter/playwright Elaine May. May directed Berlin in the 1972 film The Heartbreak Kid, which garnered Berlin Golden Globe and...

     ..... Bubbles Girardi
  • Kevin Conway ..... Smolka
  • Lewis J. Stadlen
    Lewis J. Stadlen
    Lewis J. Stadlen is an American stage and screen character actor.-Career:Born in Brooklyn, New York to voice actor Allen Swift, Stadlen studied acting with Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler...

     ..... Mandel
  • Jill Clayburgh
    Jill Clayburgh
    Jill Clayburgh was an American actress. She received Academy Award nominations for her roles in An Unmarried Woman and Starting Over.-Personal life:...

     ..... Naomi
  • Rhys Laven ..... Captain Nemo

Principal production credits

  • Producers
    Film producer
    A film producer oversees and delivers a film project to all relevant parties while preserving the integrity, voice and vision of the film. They will also often take on some financial risk by using their own money, especially during the pre-production period, before a film is fully financed.The...

     ..... Sidney Beckerman, Ernest Lehman
  • Original Music
    Film score
    A film score is original music written specifically to accompany a film, forming part of the film's soundtrack, which also usually includes dialogue and sound effects...

     ..... Michel Legrand
    Michel Legrand
    Michel Jean Legrand is a French musical composer, arranger, conductor, and pianist...

  • Cinematography
    Cinematography
    Cinematography is the making of lighting and camera choices when recording photographic images for cinema. It is closely related to the art of still photography...

     ..... Philip H. Lathrop
    Philip H. Lathrop
    Philip H. Lathrop, A.S.C. was an American cinematographer for such films as Lonely Are the Brave , Finian's Rainbow , Portnoy's Complaint , The Driver , Earthquake , The Cincinnati Kid , The Americanization of Emily , Swashbuckler , A Change of Seasons ,...

  • Production Design
    Production designer
    In film and television, a production designer is the person responsible for the overall look of a filmed event such as films, TV programs, music videos or adverts. Production designers have one of the key creative roles in the creation of motion pictures and television. Working directly with the...

     ..... Robert F. Boyle
    Robert F. Boyle
    Robert Francis Boyle was an American film art director and production designer.Born in Los Angeles, Boyle trained as an architect, graduating from the University of Southern California . When he lost his job in that field during the Great Depression, Boyle found work in films as an extra...

  • Set Decoration
    Set decorator
    A set decorator is in charge of the set dressing on a film set, which includes the furnishings, wallpaper, lighting fixtures, and many of the other objects that will be seen in the film. Props and set dressing often overlap, but are provided by different departments...

     ..... George R. Nelson
  • Costume Design
    Costume design
    Costume design is the fabrication of apparel for the overall appearance of a character or performer. This usually involves researching, designing and building the actual items from conception. Costumes may be for a theater or cinema performance but may not be limited to such...

     ..... Ruth Hancock, Eric Seelig

Critical reception

Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...

 of the Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun-Times
The Chicago Sun-Times is an American daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship paper of the Sun-Times Media Group.-History:The Chicago Sun-Times is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the city...

called the film "a true fiasco" and added, "The movie has no heart and little apparent sympathy with its Jewish characters; it replaces Roth's cynical and carefully aimed satire
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

 with a bunch of offensive one-liners, and it uses the cover of a best seller to get away with ethnic libels that entirely lose their point out of Roth's specific context. And what's maybe even worse, it takes the most cherished of all Jewish stereotype
Stereotype
A stereotype is a popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals. The concepts of "stereotype" and "prejudice" are often confused with many other different meanings...

s - the Jewish mother - and gets it wrong. The Sophie Portnoy of Roth's novel was at least a recognizable caricature
Caricature
A caricature is a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness. In literature, a caricature is a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others.Caricatures can be...

. But the Mrs. Portnoy of the movie is simply a morass of frantic dialog, clumsily photographed. There's no person there at all."

Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...

said, "It is a most effective, honest in context, necessarily strong and appropriately bawdy study in ruinous self-indulgence. Besides adapting the Philip Roth novel into a lucid, balanced and moral screenplay, and producing handsomely on various locations, Ernest Lehman makes an excellent directorial debut. Richard Benjamin heads an outstanding cast."

TV Guide
TV Guide
TV Guide is a weekly American magazine with listings of TV shows.In addition to TV listings, the publication features television-related news, celebrity interviews, gossip and film reviews and crossword puzzles...

rates the film one out of a possible four stars and comments, "Roth's novel was very funny and often shocking for its own sake, but the film, an embarrassment for everyone involved, fails miserably in adapting the book to the big screen . . . the production, done so slickly, does veil, to some degree, the horrible script and bad performances."

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK