SELECTED SCREENINGS
Austria Film Archive (2009)
For his birthday Izzie Cohen wants a motorcycle, but his father gives him a camera instead. Izzie takes a photograph of his father in an apparently compromising position and uses it to blackmail him into buying a motorcycle. When the motorcycle arrives, Izzie's father gets on and starts it accidentally. He can neither control it nor turn it off and it runs wildly through the house before crashing through the house of his Irish neighbor, Murphy. Cohen and the motorcycle zip along dragging Murphy in a bathtub. The wild ride that ensues eventually catches the attention of a traffic cop. Finally the motorcycle hits a tree and the cop arrests Cohen and Murphy for reckless driving.
The Izzie and Lizzie series picked up on the popularity during the twenties of Jewish comic characters such as Potash and Perlmutter, or Max Davison's Jewish characters in Hal Roach's films. These characters are no longer the broadly burlesqued grotesques of vaudeville, although fun is still poked at Jewish customs (such as Cohen's watch with Hebrew characters in Nize People or the intertitle in Papa's Pest which says "Izzie Cohen -his papa wouldn't let him play football because the ball was made of pigskin"). The Izzie and Lizzie series derives some of its humor from the juxtaposition of two immigrant stereotypes, Irish and Jewish. Initially based on opposition, this combination usually ends in fast friendships and romances.
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