Jewish Film Fest Celebrates Hartford’s Red Hot Mama

Sophie Tucker didn’t have a wild streak. Tucker was a wild streak. The chubby, plain, sexy Last of the Red Hot Mamas was a fearlessly brazen jazz singer, as well as the most famous person ever to emerge out of Hartford’s Jewish community.

So it makes sense that Tucker is at the heart of this year’s Mandell JCC Hartford Jewish Film Fest. The 19th annual celebration of Jewish-themed films from around the world will be held March 12 to 22 in theaters in and around Hartford. (Click through the gallery above for the schedule.)

A documentary, “The Outrageous Sophie Tucker,” will open the festival on March 12 at Infinity Music Hall on Front Street, the street where Tucker’s parents owned a restaurant at the turn of the 20th century, where she got her start as an entertainer. The evening also will include a performance by Tucker impersonator Colleen Welsh of the Hartt School. Roaring Twenties attire is encouraged.

Susan and Lloyd Ecker, who produced the movie and who wrote a fictionalized biography of Tucker, open the film with a phrase that sums up Tucker’s in-your-face appeal: “I believe in tit for tat, and if that’s the case, someone owes me a lot of tat!”

The movie features Tucker admirers Barbara Walters, Bruce Vilanch, Shecky Greene, Carol Channing, Bette Midler and Tony Bennett, who calls her “the most underrated jazz singer who ever lived.” It tells wonderful stories about Sophie’s childhood — “I was a slavey, my mother was a slavey, we all worked in this little restaurant and I hated it so!” she said of her own family’s eatery — illustrated by hundreds of Tucker’s own scrapbook photos, and some nice old photos of old Hartford.

Tucker was born Sonya Kalish while her parents were en route from Ukraine to America. Her parents changed their surname to Abuza and opened the kosher Abuza’s Home Restaurant in Hartford. Her stage name Tucker was a variation on the name of her first husband, Louis Tuck. She died in 1966 and is buried in Emmanuel Cemetery in Wethersfield.

During her career, she made a lot of friends, including her gambling buddy Al Capone and her big fan J. Edgar Hoover, who once asked to borrow one of her dresses. Judy Garland, who made a movie with Tucker, later said “Sophie Tucker is the person who taught me to put a song over.”

She made a few enemies too, such as long-forgotten vaudeville star Eva Tanguay — who was beautiful and jealous that audiences loved the fat, less-attractive girl — and impresario Flo Ziegfeld, who fired Tucker at Tanguay’s insistence.

The most touching story tells when American soldiers went to Germany in the dying days of World War II and played Tucker’s “My Yiddishe Momme” on loudspeakers while driving through the streets.

Through her career, her talent for singing was matched only by her talent for self-promotion. One commentator, scholar Jan Lewis, compared her to another Connecticut entertainment icon: “She was like P.T. Barnum, but her commodity, her circus, was herself.”

‘Above And Beyond’

One would think that a documentary about fighter pilots would have nothing in common with a like film about Tucker. But “Above and Beyond: The Birth of the Israeli Air Force” is more lighthearted than its title would suggest. It’s a charming and sometimes happy-go-lucky story of a small group of high-spirited men who were able to suppress their joie de vivre long enough to found an entire military branch.

Producer Nancy Spielberg — yes, she’s HIS sister — at first didn’t want to direct such a dry subject. A meeting with former Israeli President Shimon Peres helped change her mind. “He was so engrossed in his own story he left the room mentally. He was in 1948,” Spielberg said in a phone interview.

She started finding the men and their stories and realized this was a story about personalities, not battles. In interviews with the men and their families — including Paul “Pee-wee Herman” Rubens, the son of one of the pilots — Spielberg got a lot of funny stories in between stories of military valor.

Spielberg isn’t a big fan of the title of her film, but admits that it has its advantages. “Maybe it keeps expectations low,” she said. “People will be surprised pleasantly that they’re not watching a military film.”

Spielberg said her last name can be a mixed blessing, but that her film has gotten into Jewish film festivals and documentary film fests nationwide without bringing it up. “[Director] Roberta [Grossman] was working the festivals for me. A lot of times my name didn’t come up,” she said. “Even if she did, nobody’s going to take the film if it’s not the right film. Programmers program what their people want to see.”

‘The Farewell Party’

Another film with a serious subject that plays for unexpected laughs is “The Farewell Party,” an engaging dark comedy about assisted suicide. It tells the story about a group of elderly Israelis who, on the sly, invent a machine to help hopelessly ill people end their lives. Then word gets out. They are inundated with requests and stay one jump ahead of people who want to stop them.

Directors Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon were inspired to make the movie by the death, after a long period of suffering, of a friend of Maymon.

“In our process of saying good bye to a loved one, we discovered that when the body fails and the mind remains lucid, self-irony and humor remain the best way to cope with the prospect of death,” the directors said in an email interview from Israel. “We try to break the emotional drama with absurd and comic elements and we cast comedians to the main roles. We feel it makes this difficult and important issues more accessible to our audience.”

The directors said that death with dignity makes headlines in Israel whenever a well-known person goes to end their life in Switzerland, where aid-in-dying is legal. “Israel being a religious state, although most of the citizens are secular, doesn’t allow active euthanasia,” they wrote. “The value of the sanctity of life is a high value in Judaism and a person is not the owner of his body, soul and mind, God is.”

The release of the film in Israel prompted discussion on the subject, and led to the directors speaking at nursing homes. The talks there were serious, but they also veered into the lighthhearted. “Most of the reactions we get from the audience is ‘Did you keep the machine? Will you let us use it when the time comes?'” they wrote.

Other Films

Among the other films in the festival is an engaging documentary in which Theodore Bikel performs works by Sholom Aleichem; a dryly funny story of women in the Israeli Army; a freewheeling profile of film producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus; a drama about a Palestinian teen and his Jewish friends; and a genuinely exciting drama about a Jewish boy on the run from the Nazis.

MANDELL JCC HARTFORD JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL is March 12 to 22. More information hjff.org.