WELCOME, STU SOFFER
Indieplex Online Magazine is pleased to welcome a new contributor, Stu Soffer. Stu will be reviewing a number of films showing at The CineArts in Palo Alto, as part of the 2019 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Here Stu provides some personal insights and capsule reviews of two films, The Mamboniks and Safe Spaces.
Lex Gillespie’s documentary The Mamboniks leads us through the ethic origins, stopping in New York City at the Palladium Ballroom in the 1950s. I’m a dance klutz, however my wife occasionally runs around the kitchen with her right hand in the air trying to do the Mambo. In fact, she has old home movies of her parents and relatives doing a line dance. A dance craze adopted by singles in their twenties and thirties, its popularity spread to the New York Catskill Hotels and Bungalow colonies in their heyday. The Jennifer Gray film Dirty Dancing may have had its genesis at the Raleigh Hotel. The Mambo craze had a stop at the Tamiment Resort in the Poconos where my parents met.
The Tamiment Playhouse entertained guests with weekly revues and served as a training ground for many prominent Broadway and TV performers and writers. Playhouse alumni have included Danny Kaye, Imogene Coca, Jerome Robbins, Carol Burnett, Woody Allen, Neil Simon, and many others. Tamiment was a popular resort for Jewish singles and has been referred to as “a progressive version of the Catskills and a pillar of the Poconos tourist industry.”
The Carribean and Jewish cultures blurred: a market for dance teachers and bandleaders was partially filled by Jewish guys – like Art ‘Pancho’ Raymond from Brooklyn. While not mentioned in the film, the dances and music of West Side Story display the Caribbean dance music of that era. Jerome Robbins’ and Leonard Bernstein’s collaboration formed the dance number for the rooftop scene, America, and the mambo in the school dance scene.
Through the use of vintage film we meet the personalities of dance teachers and teams such as Killer Joe Piro, Mambo Judy and Tito Rodrigues, Max “Burnsie” Burns.
TV Host Steve Allen, once broadcast from the Riviera Hotel in Havana. The party stopped suddenly as a result of the Cuban revolution in 1958. All this also portrayed in The Godfather.
Where The Mamboniks is a documentary, Safe Spaces is a fictional story set in New York City. Director Daniel Schecter tackles a couple of themes of conflict and conflict resolution: family and extended family, the ease of slipping into perceived offensive speech, and the attendant risks and unintended consequences of trying to come to resolution – say in academic environments, and finally end-of-life illness of the remaining grandmother. A great cast with Fran Drescher and Richard Schiff. Frankly, I was teary-eyed by the end with the death of the grandmother – something we all experience to some extent. Well worth seeing, Safe Spaces explores many of the universal themes and experiences shared by all of us.
