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Just perfect...

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

I came home from work after working a 24 hour shift and turned on the TV to find something mindless to numb my brain (ready to do the same thing tomorrow), and turned on this film, I had to watch it to the end. The story is simple enough, its the tale of someone who is wrongly accused of a crime in order to satisfy someones higher political manifesto but there's an ageless quality to it. I'm not particularly clued up on films or politics, and certainly not a critic but I have to say that in these times of arrest without trial or evidence, this film strikes a chord. This film highlights some of the best and worst aspects inherent to human nature, a truly remarkable work.

When people think of anti-Semitism, they usually think of Hitler's Third Reich. But equally as bad was czarist Russia. In "The Fixer", Yakov Bok (Alan Bates) is a Jewish man who leaves the Pale (the area in Eastern Europe to which Jews were relegated) to work for someone. When they discover that he is a Jew, they imprison him on a trumped-up charge. Specifically, government bureaucrat Grubeshov (Ian Holm) believes that Jews are downright untrustworthy.The movie also shows how Yakov has to hide his background once he leaves the ghetto. In one scene, he is about to have sex with aristocrat Zinaida (Elizabeth Hartman), but he realizes that she will see that he is circumcised, and so he leaves.We can clearly see how anti-Semitic feelings were alive and well long before Hitler came to power. It's always important to remember these kinds of things.

A real Oscar winning performance by Bates.Beats me why he didn't get it!The whole story portrays the times in Russia so well with anti- semitisem as a way to keep away attention from the failings of the Csar and his evil government. A unique actor who really feels his part as can be told by Bates eyes which reflect that his soul is part of what he his doing unlike todays mimik actors.

It is not often that cinema can do justice to a great novel. This one brings out the existential questions of the lead character Yakov Blok in an honest manner, true to the original. I think I would place the credit more with screenplaywriter Dalton Trumbo for this effort. He did not even change some of the key lines of the book. I wonder what Malamud would have thought of the script.Frankenheimer needs praise in some sequences, the prison sequences and the seduction sequence--but what amuses me no end is why he chose to cast the three actresses who speak their lines with no care for even a semblance of being East European. Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde, Hugh Griffith, David Warner and Ian Holm are all good actors but Frankenheimer made no effort to make them speak like Russians or East Europeans. Bogarde is predictable in his role, but Alan Bates carried the film. He alone played his role with conviction. Maurice Jarre's music was good but not his best.Like "Gandhi" this film will be remembered because of the subject, not because of its cinema. The true hero was not Bates, not Trumbo, not Frankenheimer--it was Malamud!