Robert Lantos and I have the same taste in cigars but that doesn’t mean we’re brothers in arms. Oh, what I could have done with that budget! Mind you, the casting is perfect, and so are what they nowadays call “production values”. The women are knock-outs and the movie is a joy to watch. Truly entertaining. I hope they make millions. Florence and the children deserve that. And Robert and all the others went to truly admirable lengths to be faithful to the book. Nobody can blame them for cutting, and I certainly don’t mind their transposing my Paris in the ’fifties to their Rome in the ’seventies. I’ve done my share of movie-making and know that being faithful to the book can be a trap.
So what’s gone wrong? Is it that Barney is too much of a jerk to be lovable? He certainly makes more sense in print. As to lovability – who am I to judge since, of course, he’s a self-portrait? So this point is a trifle sensitive. Is it that the satire got lost because of all those “production values”? I meant that Jewish wedding to be inexcusably vulgar and not a delightful orgy to which every sane movie-goer would love to have been invited.
No, it’s worse than that. And it has nothing to do with translating from one medium to another. They would have got it right if they had got the spirit right – the serious intention. They should have read the Auden poem I put on the front page of St. Urbain’s Horseman:
Defenceless under the night
Our world in a stupor lies;
Yes, dotted everywhere
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair
Show an affirming flame.
• • • • • •
Three short stories have been posted. More>
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
I enjoyed he post-mortem from Mordecai, and this sketch has tipped my point towards seing it on the screen. Very enjoyable advice.
Much more fun to read than most blogs on the Web, however serious.
Continue channeling your old friends, and I’ll start forwarding them to my old friends.
Mordecai touches on an often forgotten pleasure: enjoying a fine cigar while disusing the wonders of our world with a friend.
…but here’s the thing: Mordecai Richler died in July of 2001. How is he able to comment on a film just coming out now?
Cineplex has screens in Heaven.