Fishke Goes to War

"Fishke Goes to War" (or "Fishke in the Reserves," to translate its Hebrew title) is a comedy by George Obadiah, who was better known for his melodramas and criticized for their lack of subtlety. There is nothing subtle about "Fishke" either. It is a vehicle for comic actor Moshe Solo, whose wide-eyed naif prefigures Andy Kaufman's. He follows his friend Shmil into the army and proves that behind his meek exterior, he has what takes. Shmil is played by Paul L. Smith, a serious actor later famous as the villain in Midnight Express, and Smith helped direct this movie, but the script provides little to work with and indeed the script is the main problem, belaboring one lame joke after another (with minor characters laughing in case we haven't noticed the humor) and stumbling along through lapses of logic. The film was made at a time when Israel's Arab enemies were routinely laughed off (between the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War), and in retrospect the movie's treatment of Arabs as ciphers is a little embarrassing. There are times when shots are drawn out to the point where you could wonder whether Obadiah was having trouble stretching the movie to full length. But at the time, there were very few Israeli movies at all and the bar was not set very high.