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Reviews
Te'alat Blaumilch (1969)
Hilarious satire, at times painfully realistic
Sadly, the movie is at times painfully realistic in its description of grandiose politicians, political appointees pretending they are doing their job, Near-Eastern 'muddling through', half-arsed workmanship, and the like.
And like sometimes in real life, the only person who dares say that the emperor is buck- naked (nerdish city hall flunky Ziegler, who discovered how asylum escapee Blaumilch started the whole 'project') gets declared insane for his troubles.
One of many good laughs was near the end where a couple that lives on Allenby Canal (formerly Allenby Street) can no longer make love without playing a tape recording of Blaumilch's pneumatic drill.
One of the bit-players, the beat cop played by Shaike Ophir, later became the eponymous protagonist of Kishon's third full-length movie, HaShoter Azoulai (http://us.imdb.com/title/ tt0066374/)
After Ephraim Kishon z"l passed away, his three most famous full-length movies (Sallach Shabbati, http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0058541/, Te'alat Blaumilch, and HaShoter Azoulai) got re-released on DVD. The DVDs (4:3 aspect ratio) offer original (Hebrew), English, or French sound, and subtitles in some additional languages.
As an illustration of the rapid evolution of modern Hebrew, some of the Hebrew words used in the movie sound outdated to the modern ear.
Reilly: Ace of Spies (1983)
Theme music actually by Shostakovich
Great series, undeniably.
One bit of trivia/credits: while Harry Rabinowitz may have written a "Shostakovich-influenced" score, the theme music itself is actually a recycled composition by the great Dmitri Shostakovich himself, namely the "Romance" from the movie score to "The Gadfly", Opus 97.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048461/
I found this out by accident when my daughter brought a new piece home from her (Russian immigrant) violin teacher and started playing it. Having instantly recognized it, I looked at the score which said "Romance" and "Shostakovich" in Cyrillic (Russian) letters. Some Googling for "Romance Shostakovich Reilly" yielded name and opus number, and an MP3 download confirmed the identity of the piece.