Alec’s Irish Roz

A Majority of One (Warner). A Jewish comedian once remarked that Jewish humor is universal: it can be understood in all five boroughs of New York City. This Jewish situation comedy is a case in point. It was one of Broadway’s top dollars for 16 months (1959-60). but as a movie it will surely seem a little alien to an average goy west of the Hudson. Nevertheless, to those with a taste for such things. Majority will come as a warm though slightly soggy knish of sentiment.

Like the play, a too-cute intercontinental switch on Abie’s Irish Rose, the film tells the story of Bertha Jacoby (Rosalind Russell), an elderly Jewish widow from Brooklyn who takes a trip to Japan. On the boat Bertha meets Koichi Asano (Sir Alec Guinness), a Japanese textile tycoon who has “also hed a cupf’l,” as Bertha sympathetically puts it—he lost two children in the war, and his wife died not long after Bertha’s Sam passed away (“ective in business to the lest”). What’s more, the poor man has a cold. Oy veh! Bertha rushes to the rescue with handy home remedies: “Soap and vater and stewed prunes, and you should gahgle vit hodt vater and peroxide.”

How can a lonely old millionaire resist? He invites her to his house in Tokyo for mint tea—”Mm,” she says appreciatively, “tastes like hodt possley”—and proposes marriage. Bertha at first demurs, but later Koichi turns up in Brooklyn, and at the fade it looks as if Bertha has acquired a samurai to take the place of Sam.

Majority is much too long (2 hr. 20 min. 30 sec.), and it lacks the kindly, take-a-piece-fruit intimacy of the play. But Actor Guinness breaks out a sensational Tokyo brogue (“Prease feer free to use my country crub”) and contrives to seem charmingly inscrutable behind the craziest set of epicanthic folds any actor was ever pasted to—they look like two fat little patties of ravioli hanging from his eyebrows. Actress Russell, humped up and nipped out till she resembles a superannuated ostrich, encompasses quite without caricature the standard repertory of Jewish gesture—the delicately deprecating shrug that says: I don’t mean to offend, but a fact is a fact; the vigorous extension of the hands, chest high and palms up, that means: you got problems? / got problems. What Actress Russell fails to reproduce is the special warmth of Jewish motherhood, the Old-Testamental intensity of devotion. She has done a skillful piece of work, but it takes more than skill to turn Auntie Mame into Molly Goldberg.