THE FRISCO KID
Directed by Robert Aldrich
Screenplay by Michael Elias and Frank Shaw
The idea is marvelous: send a gentle, pious and very stupid young Polish rabbi to the U.S. in 1850 to take over a congregation in wicked San Francisco. Shlepping his way overland from Philadelphia, he will be tricked by con men, be friended by a lonesome bank robber, roasted by the desert sun, frozen by mountain storms, captured by Indians, and from sea to shining sea, he will cause wise men to marvel at his unparalleled and in exhaustible nitwittedness. With Gene Wilder as the woodenheaded rabbi and Harrison Ford as the lovable bank robber, what could go wrong?
Let's pass that question for the moment and ask what went right. There is a lovely moment when the bearded, black-suited Wilder, who has just been beaten and robbed, sees some Amish farmers, mistakes them for Jews and rushes toward them, rejoicing at the top of his voice in Yiddish. Another piece of superior nuttiness has Wilder trying, and utterly failing, to suppress his gabby, questioning nature at supper among the silent monks of a Trappist monastery.
The Frisco Kid just misses being very good, perhaps because although Wilder is funny and endearing, we never quite believe in the character he plays. He is not really a pure Polish rabbi, he is Gene Wilder doing bits. We are asked to laugh at all too human failings, as we laugh at Tevye's in Fiddler on the Roof, but through some lapse of direction or acting, we are never really shown a man. — John Skow