Za'am V'Tehilah

Avi Nesher the writer/director was doing rather well in his native Israel, but when this movie was resoundingly unappreciated, he went off to Hollywood. There he never did rise above potboilers, and when he returned to Israel, surprise: his subsequent movies were critically and popularly embraced one after the other. His 2021 "Image of Victory," he says, tries to strike a certain balance by depicting both Israeli and Egyptian fighters as victims of political interests. "Rage and Glory," on the other hand, bluntly depicts the British as ogres in the Israeli War of Independence.

Just as the British soldiers are undifferentiated, most of their idealistic opponents in the Lehi underground are somewhat hard to tell apart. It may be a case of just too many characters and not enough time to spend on them as people. Constraints of time may also be responsible for the depiction of attacks that the protagonists carry out in complex coordination without much indication of how the planning was done.

On the positive side, there is great panache in the recreation of scenes set in the Jerusalem of 1942. A top photographer, David Gurfinkel, is behind the camera. And the suspense is dialed high (my wife stopped watching, saying it was past her limit).

Unfortunately, some of the dialogue is dubbed sloppily.

And although IMDB starts its capsule summary "An avowed anarchist and Stern Gang hitman is sent to Jerusalem to assassinate a senior British officer," that plot arc didn't even register with me. To me the plot looked like no more than "Let's attack the British" followed by "Let's attack the British again."

But Nesher cites political reasons for the film's failure. Some people blamed it for showing the Lehi underground as heroic, others blamed it for showing them as immorally violent. In any case, the film is now considered a kind of a milestone and as such, it was nicely restored in 2013.