Some characters can see no future for themselves; Ivan Voinitsky—Uncle Vanya (Innokenti Smoktunovsky, superb)—feels that even his meager present is being stripped away. For years he has managed his sister’s country estate, where he lives with their mother and his niece, Sonya. Dutifully he has sent to his sister and her spouse, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Serebryakov, […]

Rod Steiger was excrutiatingly mannered as Sol Nazerman, the misanthropic Holocaust survivor in The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1965), which he adjudged to be his best performance. Steiger was merely irritatingly mannered in what he considered to be his next-best performance, as Carl Schaffner, an embezzling German-born British tycoon fleeing authorities in Across the Bridge. Steiger’s […]