A rare and forgotten 1982 film adaptation of literary giant Chaim Potok's enduring and best-selling 1967 novel, "The Chosen" is an extremely timely and newly relevant watch in the wake of the Hamas War. It was selected as the single greatest film ever made about Jewish life in the 1998 book "The 50 Greatest Jewish Films: A Critic's Ranking Of The Very Best" by Kathryn Bernheimer. It should be noted that at the time of its original release, it was Barry Miller's performance as Reuven Malter that received the overwhelming majority of critical acclaim, overshadowing 1970's teen idol Robbie Benson and even Oscar winners Maximilian Schell and Rod Steiger. He had made a tremendous impact on audiences and critics in the late 1970's and early 1980's in the classic "Saturday Night Fever" as the tragic character "Bobby C." and especially in Sir Alan Parker's Oscar-winning "Fame," as the drug-addicted Puerto Rican stand-up comic wannabe following down the same doomed path as his Hollywood idol Freddie Prinze, and was particularly championed by renowned critic Gene Siskel at that time as one of the most gifted and promising young actors of his generation. Alas, despite a Tony Award-winning 1985 Broadway stage debut and continually acclaimed film performances under prestigious directors like Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese, major Hollywood "name" stardom was not to be. As of 2024, and in the wake of Jonathan Glazer's impactful and Oscar-winning "The Zone Of Interest", it might be a fortuitous time to re-release "The Chosen" back into specialized "arthouse" movie theatres. There is a sequence in the film that invokes a visceral re-introduction into the historical amnesia of our present cultural moment: documentary newsreel footage of the Allied liberation of the Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War 2. The producers of "The Chosen" were Ely and Edie Landau, responsible for such historically important and groundbreaking Jewish-themed films as Sidney Lumet's "The Pawnbroker" (1965) and the adaptation of Robert Shaw's play "The Man In The Glass Booth" (1975) directed by Arthur Hiller.
A rare and forgotten 1982 film adaptation of literary giant Chaim Potok's enduring and best-selling 1967 novel, "The Chosen" is an extremely timely and newly relevant watch in the wake of the Hamas War. It was selected as the single greatest film ever made about Jewish life in the 1998 book "The 50 Greatest Jewish Films: A Critic's Ranking Of The Very Best" by Kathryn Bernheimer. It should be noted that at the time of its original release, it was Barry Miller's performance as Reuven Malter that received the overwhelming majority of critical acclaim, overshadowing 1970's teen idol Robbie Benson and even Oscar winners Maximilian Schell and Rod Steiger. He had made a tremendous impact on audiences and critics in the late 1970's and early 1980's in the classic "Saturday Night Fever" as the tragic character "Bobby C." and especially in Sir Alan Parker's Oscar-winning "Fame," as the drug-addicted Puerto Rican stand-up comic wannabe following down the same doomed path as his Hollywood idol Freddie Prinze, and was particularly championed by renowned critic Gene Siskel at that time as one of the most gifted and promising young actors of his generation. Alas, despite a Tony Award-winning 1985 Broadway stage debut and continually acclaimed film performances under prestigious directors like Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese, major Hollywood "name" stardom was not to be. As of 2024, and in the wake of Jonathan Glazer's impactful and Oscar-winning "The Zone Of Interest", it might be a fortuitous time to re-release "The Chosen" back into specialized "arthouse" movie theatres. There is a sequence in the film that invokes a visceral re-introduction into the historical amnesia of our present cultural moment: documentary newsreel footage of the Allied liberation of the Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War 2. The producers of "The Chosen" were Ely and Edie Landau, responsible for such historically important and groundbreaking Jewish-themed films as Sidney Lumet's "The Pawnbroker" (1965) and the adaptation of Robert Shaw's play "The Man In The Glass Booth" (1975) directed by Arthur Hiller.