Green Fields
By Ed Grant -- Video Business, 6/13/2005
The National Center for Jewish Film ( www.jewishfilm.org), B&W, NR, 96 min. plus supplements, stereo, fullscreen, Street: Available now, $36; First Run: L, 1937, NA
A favorite among film buffs for the way he worked wonders on shoestring budgets, Edgar G. Ulmer had the singular distinction of making a number of authentically flavored ethnic movies in languages he couldn't speak. Besides an Ukranian feature, he made four films in Yiddish, of which Green Fields is the first and the best-loved by scholars of Jewish cinema. The 1937 film is based on a 1916 play with an old-world story line: A scholar takes a journey and winds up becoming the subject of contention between two farmers, both of whom want him to teach their children (and marry their daughters). On-screen program notes by critic J. Hoberman supply information on the film's ultra-low-budget shoot on a farm in New Jersey and the ways in which Ulmer developed the visuals while his co-director Jacob Ben-Ami, a veteran Yiddish actor, helped the actors rehearse. Adding an interesting dissenting voice in a 1982 interview snippet is actress Dena Drute, who maintains that the Czech-born, Vienna-raised Ulmer behaved like a "Prussian general" and "a little Napoleon" during the shoot. Ulmer's take is revealed in the disc's best feature, a 30-minute audio excerpt from a 1970 interview by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. Ulmer's account of Green Fields' production is quite detailed and builds to a series of remarkable anecdotes that might not be true. For example, the 66-year-old director says Variety wrote that the farm where he shot the film was located "between a [Nazi] bund campground and a nudist colony." No one can be sure, though, if a New York Times critic was really fired because he panned the film, or if NYC police had to force ardent moviegoers from re-watching Green Fields all day. It doesn't really matter, as the interview reminds us what made Ulmer such a distinct, no-budget director: His ability to spin a tale. The National Center for Jewish film also recently issued three of Ulmer's other Yiddish films on DVD as well as the 1939 Tevye, the inspiration for Fiddler on the Roof.
