Le voleur de chevaux

It's hard to make a judgment on a film that you might want to say is far better than it appears. But the DVD I saw of Romance Of A Horsethief had the most horrible sound quality, one of the worst I ever heard with a film that had some justifiable reasons to consider it good. I must have missed any number of witticisms that came from Joseph and David Opatoshu, the father and son original creators of the work.

The same rueful acceptance, the same cynicism that characterized Fiddler On The Roof without the joyous music is found in Romance Of A Horsethief. It's 1904 and the Czarist armies are needing cavalry horses for the upcoming war with Japan which ironically enough turned out to be a naval war. So it's not like the American west where the cavalry actually bought and paid for mounts and cavalry horses became the fulcrum of many a western good and bad. No, in an absolute monarchy the Czar merely requisitions what he needs from the peasants be they Christian or Jew. Stealing from both you would think might get them to thinking we have a common enemy, but that fact takes a long time in realization.

Yul Brynner is the Cossack commander sent to the Russian part of occupied Poland whose job it is to run that part of Poland and get the Czar's horses. Eli Wallach is the amiable horse-thief whose profession has found a new status of honor he never expected in his life. He becomes a revolutionary in spite of himself.

Romance Of A Horsethief almost could have been a musical, there are places some numbers could have been dropped. Best in the cast is Lainie Kazan who makes quite the fool of Brynner the occupier. Who could resist Lainie's twin weapons of mass destruction?

A really bad sound quality keeps this last work of Abraham Polonsky from being a classic.

A little knowledge of Polish history makes this movie a lot more meaningful, and abandon any idea that it is romantic in the way we think of the word today. Those caveats aside, this is a neglected film from 1971 that holds up quite well. The hyper-masculine Yul Brynner is the star in every sense, swaggering his way through as the Cossack who has been put in charge of the Polish town of Mlawa. Meanwhile the Jewish residents of a nearby shtetl plot and scheme to steal horses and defy the Russian authorities. A Polish gentleman of the upper class wants to marry his daughter off to a French dandy, while she falls for one of the Jewish horsethieves. Mind you, this is a time when Poland had been wiped off the map, and the Germans and the Russians were vying for their piece of the country. Favorite scene: Yul Brynner in a brothel drinking champagne and then chewing up the glass. Favorite line: "Polish peasants can't read, and the Jewish peasants won't."

In circa 1904 Polish Russia, the Czar has tasked Cossack Captain Stoloff (Yul Brynner) with requisitioning all of the horses he can for use in the Russo-Japanese War. This puts him at odds with a local group of Jewish peasants, led by Kifke (Eli Wallach), who trade in stolen horses. Brash young horse thief Zanvill (Oliver Tobias) is the most accomplished of the lot, and while that makes him a target for Stoloff, it doesn't help when Zanvill begins a romance with local noblewoman Naomi (Jane Birkin), just returned from France with revolutionary ideals.

This was scripted by David Opatoshu, and based on a novel by his father, a famous Yiddish writer. Opatoshu should be familiar to anyone who watched any television from the 1960's. This movie plays like a mash-up of two other 1971 releases, Fiddler on the Roof and Nicholas & Alexandra, and lacquered in a Tom Jones veneer. Oliver Tobias is the lead (he gets an "introducing" credit), and he was a noted theater star in Great Britain at the time. Both he and Birkin get overshadowed when any of their more notable co-stars are on screen, and the cast is unusual. Brynner and Wallach get to relive their Magnificent Seven days, while Lainie Kazan and Serge Gainsbourg seem dropped in from another planet.

It's safe to assume that, even among casual film buffs, the fate of Abraham Polonsky is arguably better known than his actual cinematic works are since his is arguably the most notorious case of the impact that the Red Scare/HUAC hearings of the late 1940s had on a promising Hollywood career. After writing the seminal boxing drama BODY AND SOUL (1947), Polonsky stepped into the director's chair for the first (and, for the next 21 years, only) directorial effort with the marvelous noir FORCE OF EVIL (1948); incidentally, both these movies starred an even more fatal casualty of that Communist purge, John Garfield – who died a mere 4 years later at just 39 years of age. The political climate in Hollywood changed over the years and, by the end of the 1960s, Polonsky was able to officially work again, both as writer – on Don Siegel's MADIGAN (1968) – and, more importantly, as a director – on the acclaimed Revisionist Western TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE (1969) and the much lighter ROMANCE OF A HORSETHIEF. As it turned out, Polonsky's directorial stint still proved short-lived as he was advised, for medical reasons, not to undertake any more strenuous projects! Equally ironic is the fact that, while on the Italian-language TV print I watched the opening credits clearly state that one is about to see "an Abraham Polonsky film", the actual credited director has an unpronounceable Yugoslavian name!!

On original release, the film under review seems to have been quite well-received by critics but the public stayed away and, while this may have surprised Polonsky himself, in hindsight I'd say it was just too old-fashioned and inconsequential for its own good. Or perhaps it was simply overshadowed by Norman Jewison's 3-hour musical FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (1971) – which similarly deals with the trials and tribulations of Jewish Poles in a war-torn society in a light-hearted fashion. The cast list was certainly impressive: Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, David Opatoshu (who also penned the script based on his father's novel), Henri Serre, Jane Birkin, Serge Gainsbourg, Oliver Tobias (his first starring role) and Marilu' Tolo. But it's Lainie Kazan who steals the show as the lusty, busty brothel madam who seduces Russian Captain Brynner to keep him away from his duty of pursuing her intended, horsethief Wallach; the sequence where cross-dressed Wallach and Tobias attempt to spring three horses hidden inside the brothel unbeknownst to drunken Brynner is the film's comic highlight. Meanwhile, peasant Opatoshu's son Tobias romances wealthy liberal Birkin who, in turn, is engaged to clumsy French gentleman (Gainsbourg, who else?). This enjoyable but ultimately unsubstantial film also boasts a fine score by Mort Shuman and attractive cinematography by Piero Portalupi.

"Romance of a Horsethief" is a marvelous, little-known gem that, unfortunately, appears to have been transferred to DVD from a badly degraded VHS recording. The sound especially is terrible, sounding like static when the volume passes even a moderate level. What a shame. I would like to think somewhere there is a quality studio transfer that could do this movie justice. The video also suffers. It isn't the worst I have ever seen, but "Horsethief" deserves better.

Obviously the reviewers here who say that Lainie Kazan stole the movie are men (one even noting her "twin weapons of mass destruction", etc.) She was good, an asset to the film, but it's obvious these men are ogling at a beautiful sexy body and their minds say, "She's the best thing in it!" :-D The scene stealers, if you ask me, a woman, are Yul Brynner and Eli Wallach, and my opinion is not influenced by their masculine assets! They were simply two excellent veteran actors chewing up the scenery as they usually did. This 1971 movie was not the first time Brynner and Wallach starred together; the first was the excellent 1960 Western "The Magnificent Seven". And of course, they were the standouts in that one as well.

I agree with a couple of reviewers who noted "Romance of a Horsethief" would have made a good musical, ala "Fiddler on the Roof". As a matter of fact, I thought of "Fiddler" as I watched "Horsethief". The setting and the mood, atmosphere, etc., even the title, would lend itself to musical numbers well.

If you can get your hands on a copy of this movie, you won't be sorry as far as the movie itself is concerned, if you can manage to look past the bad audio and middling video quality.