To Aristotle, tragedy's effect was tripartite; it moved from pity to terror to catharsis. By those tenets, as valid as they are venerable, Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer Prize novel The Fixer misses greatness by a third. It has the first two requisites, but it omits any purge of the emotions. Malamud brings his hero, Yakov Bok, to the brink of destruction—or salvation—and freezes the action. There, in Auden's phrase, "the seas of pity lie, locked and frozen in each eye." By definition, the film of The Fixer can aspire to be only two-thirds of a great movie. Still, it has within it an irresistible moral force and an impressive cast of characters who have truly Dostoevskian resonance.
Alan Bates plays Bok—a handyman, a fixer of broken things. His home is the shtetl, a rural Jewish village in 1911 Russia. It is a time of pogroms and malignant rumors of Jews who murder Christians as part of their religious rites. Bok, possessed of a barren, faithless wife (Carol White), abandons his emotions, his conscience and his home. His destination is the ancient Russian Orthodox city of Kiev, where he promptly sends himself to hell by passing as a gentile. In scenes that seem to have emerged from the mainstream of Russian literature, Lebedev (Hugh Griffith), a rabid anti-Semite, makes Bok a trusted employee until Lebedev's daughter Zinaida (Elizabeth Hartman) falsely accuses the fixer of rape. The recriminatory shriek becomes a chorus when religious fanatics also accuse Bok of ritual murder. The fixer is seized and imprisoned. The . machinery of the state begins: moved by a heritage of hate, it tries to grind the fixer to dust.
Shining Interior. Astonishingly, he will not disintegrate, All the degradations, all the tortures will not make him confess to his "crimes." As the universal sufferer, Bates wears the exhausted eyes, the depleted physique, the rime of salt about the parched lips like indestructible medals. In Malamud's view and in Bates' playing, Bok becomes a second Job who grows from suffering to manhood. The fixer finally fixes himself, and, symbolically, all sufferers. Like the book, the film has no end, only a conclusion: there is no such thing as indifference; an abstention from humanity is a vote for evil. When Yakov goes to trial the story halts, as if the future were epilogue. Unfortunately, it is not. Malamud based his novel on the agonies of a real Russian Jew, Mendel Beiliss, who was finally exonerated. Torn between actuality and false doom, The Fixer becomes a victim of artistic indecision.
Because the story has no conventional plot development, it is at its interior that the film shines. In the title role, Bates' indomitable intelligence radiates through the rough peasant vocabulary and makes Yakov too mortal to die.
As a symbol he is perfect; as a Jew he is wanting. Betrayed by his English accent, he cannot articulate inversions like "Luck I was always short of" without seeming to pronounce the quotation marks around the words. His most effective support comes from Dirk Bogarde as Bibikov, the court-assigned defender of the fixer. Wearing a fine mask of melancholy disdain, he grows gradually more revulsed by the corruption he witnesses in the palace of justice; his actions and his death predict the fall of the Romanovs as surely as any Leninist edict.