Main Cast: George Segal, Jack Warden, Joseph Wiseman, Sorrell Booke
Release Year: 1968
Country: US
Run Time: 94 minutes
Plot
Bye Bye Braverman is a bittersweet adaptation of Wallace Markfield's coldly cynical novel To an Early Grave. Braverman, an idealistic minor author, dies; his four best friends, writers who in one way or another have all sold out, decide to attend his funeral. The foursome includes a disenchanted magazine writer (George Segal), a poet (Jack Warden), a book reviewer (Sorrell Booke), and an embittered bellyacher (Joseph Wiseman). Taking a picaresque journey from Greenwich Village to Brooklyn, the quartet never quite gets to the funeral, but their odyssey unearths many a self-revelation and previously unspoken truth. Like its four leading characters, Bye Bye Braverman loses its way towards the end, bringing this otherwise insightful comedy/drama to a muddied conclusion. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
In the talkative Bye Bye Braverman, a foursome of cynical Jewish New York writers drive to the funeral of their friend, a writer named Braverman. Adapted from To an Early Grave, a novel by Wallace Markfield, the film is a clever, fanciful, often morose exploration of success, self-realization, and friendship. The humor is heavily Jewish, drawing on the insular culture of the New York literary world. None of the friends is very happy with his life, and the film is full of complaint. The stars include George Segal and Jack Warden. The film is notable as a stepping stone in the unorthodox career of director Sidney Lumet. Lumet's father was a Yiddish stage actor, and Lumet's familiarity with the cultural territory infuses Bye Bye Braverman with a wry knowingness. This was Lumet's first important film after the acclaimed The Pawnbroker, and, like that film, it has the feel of a cinematic stage piece subtly enriched by Lumet's inquisitive camera. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide
Bye Bye Braverman is a 1968 Americancomedy film directed by Sidney Lumet. The screenplay by Herbert Sargent was adapted from the 1964 novel To An Early Grave by Wallace Markfield. Unreleased to consumers for decades, the movie was finally made available for purchase on DVD in April 2009 as part of the Warner Archive series.[1]
When idealistic minor author Leslie Braverman dies suddenly from a heart attack at the age of 41, his four best friends decide to attend his funeral. The quartet of Jewishintellectuals drawn from the four corners of Manhattan consists of public relations writer Morroe Rieff from the Upper East Side, poet Barnet Weinstein from the Lower East Side, book reviewer Holly Levine from the Lower West Side, and Yiddish writer (and chronic complainer) Felix Ottensteen from the Upper West Side. The opening credits make clear that these men have been friends since their youth. They agree to meet at Christopher Park on Sheridan Square, a Greenwich Village landmark, from which they travel in Levine's cramped Volkswagen Beetle. Due to confusion and bad directions from Braverman's widow, the men attend the wrong funeral but finally arrive at the cemetery in time for the burial. The centerpiece of the movie is the extensive running discussion among the four men along the way, as they talk about everything from philosophical observations regarding death to the relative merits of classic comic book characters, all while maintaining a strongly Jewish comedic tone emphasizing irony and sarcasm. Rieff, who emerges as the central character, periodically experiences absurdist fantasy episodes or daydreams involving his own mortality, eventually delivering a soliloquy to a vast array of gravestones bringing the dead up to date on what they have missed lately.
The character Leslie Braverman never actually appears in the movie, by flashback or otherwise, and is known only through descriptions and references to him by other characters. (Braverman's coffin is shown briefly, with him presumably inside, at the cemetery.) While Braverman is dead from the outset in both the book and the movie, there are occasions in the book but not the movie where his own words are quoted, often at considerable length as from a letter.
Markfield has been called "The Joyce of Brighton Beach," suggesting by analogy a comparison between Markfield and this quintessentially Jewish neighborhood and the essential literary synergy between James Joyce and his native Dublin, but also suggesting other connections.[2] The structure of Markfield's To an Early Grave, and therefore of the movie based upon it, is to some extent a comic parallel of Joyce's novel Ulysses, specifically "Episode 6" (which is commonly known as the "Hades" chapter) where protagonist Leopold Bloom and three friends travel in a carriage to attend the funeral of Patrick "Paddy" Dignam who has died in a drunken stupor. The fantasy or flashback experiences of Morroe Rieff mirror Joyce's stream of consciousness writing style. In turn, Joyce's Dignam character is generally regarded as an echo of Elpenor in the Odyssey from ancient Greece.
It has been suggested that the character of Leslie Braverman was modeled on that of author Isaac Rosenfeld, who died of a heart attack at age 38 in 1956. Rosenfeld's premature death in failed circumstances is mentioned prominently in the memoirs of many who, like Markfield, were in the Partisan Review literary circle, including Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, and William Phillips. Rosenfeld has also been acknowledged as the model for the character of King Dahfu in the 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow; Rosenfeld and Bellow had been friends since their teenage years.[3]
In her New York Times review, Renata Adler described the film as "a movie about New York Jews, which — by some unlucky mixed perspective of affection and satire — turns into a pogrom . . . Sidney Lumet gets a chance to explore some Brooklyn neighborhoods and to show some Orthodox Jews in their relative Old Testament purity (the movie seems to be, in part, a lampoon of Reform Jewry, a bit intramural for a picture of this size) . . . In the end, though, with The Group and Bye Bye Braverman, [he] has probably exhausted the cinema possibilities of drawing people together out of separate lives to attend funerals in semisatirical circumstances. It hardly ever works in fiction, and it does not seem the best vehicle for his movies at all."[4]
Pauline Kael described it as "a crudely affectionate comic romp. The movie is often gross and it's sloppily thrown together, but the characters' rhetoric has some juice in it . . . It's a low-comedy situation played for emotional wallowing as well as for laughs."[5]
Time said it "has a lot to talk about, and nothing much to say . . . As the story's central character, actor Segal shows flashes of a comic talent hitherto unexplored by Hollywood. But what picture there is for stealing is burgled by Wiseman with his portrayal of a stereotypical literateur."[6]
According to the Time Out London Film Guide, the film is "a little unfocused but bristles with Jewish wit and fine performances."[7]
