The Singing Blacksmith (DVD)

Yankel is a handsome, uneducated blacksmith who spends his days hammering away at his forge and his nights drinking and carousing with women. He never questions this lifestyle until he meets Tamara, a progressive girl of rare sensitivity. Yankel resolves to leave his old ways behind, and the two are married. Their happy union is threatened when they rent a room to Rivke, a lascivious woman who has just left her husband. Her lustful nature stirs long-buried feelings inside Yankel, and when she tries to seduce him at his forge, the blacksmith must choose between fidelity to his wife or giving in to wanton passion...

The Singing Blacksmith is one of five Yiddish language pictures made by B-movie auteur Edgar G. Ulmer. After angering Carl Laemmle at Universal (who had produced The Black Cat (1934), considered by many to be the director's best) Ulmer was forced into working on "ethnic films" made outside the provinces of Hollywood. With his usual resourcefulness, Ulmer single handedly built a plywood shtetl in rural New Jersey, which served as the movie's primary setting. (It was on land owned by Benedictine monks, and located between a nudist colony and a training camp run by the Nazi-supporting German American Bund!) The Singing Blacksmith is probably the most notable of the Yiddish films Ulmer directed because it stars Moishe Oysher, who was a well-known singing star on the radio. Born in a Bessarabian village in 1935 and descended from several generations of cantors, Oysher left home as a teenager with dreams of stardom. He made his Broadway debut in 1935, while still working as a cantor at multiple synagogues in New York. The disconnect Oysher experienced between his two careers was explored in his other two ventures into Yiddish cinema, The Cantor's Son (1937) and Overture to Glory (1940). As for Edgar G. Ulmer, he would return to Hollywood making interesting low-budget films for PRC and United Artists, most notably Detour (1945), The Strange Woman (1946), and The Man from Planet X (1951).

In Yiddish with English subtitles.

• drama