All About Jewish Theatre - Taking Sides from Stage to Screen

Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides had a short life on Broadway, lasting only ten weeks in 1996, but the play has had lengthy runs in numerous other countries.

As we’ll see, one such production led to Ronald Harwood’s Oscar winning screenplay for “The Pianist.” Acclaimed director Istvan Szabo (“Mephisto,” Sunshine”) happened to catch another production, this one in Vienna, and saw clear parallels to his own life as an artist in Communist Hungary. That viewing ultimately led to Szabo’s directing the crisp, intelligent film version of “Taking Sides,” which began a platform release in New York on Sept. 5.

Both the play and the film are anchored by the 1946 confrontation in Berlin between Major Steve Arnold (Harvey Keitel in the film), a gruff U.S. Army major, and Wilhelm Furtwangler (the extraordinary Stellan Skarsgard), the renowned conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Arnold has been sent to investigate the depth of Furtwangler’s dealings with the Nazi party; after all, the esteemed conductor performed on the eve of the Nuremberg rally, and the Nazis played his recording of the Adagio of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony on state radio when Hitler’s death was announced. But Furtwangler never joined the Nazi party, took steps to provide safety to several Jewish members of the orchestra and held his baton in such a way that he never had to address Hitler with the Nazi salute.

Furtwangler believes that his role as an artist renders him completely independent of and superior to the ugly skirmishes of politics; Arnold maintains that the politics of Nazism held sway over virtually all of Furtwangler’s actions. In Arnold’s opinion, the very fact that Furtwangler helped Jews in the first place confirms that he knew the Jews needed help, which means his staying and working in Germany was morally untenable. Who’s right?

Szabo, who was a teenager when the 1956 Soviet invasion established Communist rule in Hungary, found himself particularly drawn to the question of whether art and politics can (or should) be separate. He insisted on adding the character of Dymshitz, a Russian officer who takes a great interest in helping Furtwangler get cleared of any wrongdoing and then bringing the conductor back to Russia. “Stalin wanted, if you’ll pardon the expression, to own Furtwangler,” Szabo says. “Dictatorships take great interest in artists. They are happy to own artists and show them to the world.”

Harwood repeated this sentiment. “Art and politics are inextricable in a totalitarian society, and I’m not sure that’s true in a democracy. Totalitarian governments take art very seriously; democracies don’t. Democracies don’t care, which is one of the great freedoms as an artist.”

Harwood’s involvement with “The Pianist,” another story of a musician who considers himself oblivious to the horrors of Nazism and lives to regret that notion, came about as a result of a Paris production of Taking Sides. “Polanski saw the play and thought, ‘Well, this is about music and the Nazis. Perhaps this is the guy to write “The Pianist,”’” Harwood says. In fact, “Taking Sides” was filmed before “The Pianist” but is only now being distributed in the United States.

Horrible timing seems to be a major reason for this long delay in securing U.S. distribution. “Taking Sides” premiered at the Toronto Film Festival within days of September 11, 2001, and the shift in public sentiment posed huge difficulties for a film that portrays the central U.S. character as a brash philistine who repeatedly refers to one of the world’s greatest conductors as “Hitler’s bandleader.” Not surprisingly, both Harwood and Szabo take issue with this stereotype. “If you look at both the play and the film,” Harwood points out, “the American is the only character who speaks of the dead. Everyone else speaks of art and the soul, and he speaks of the dead. He’s the only one.” Major Arnold’s moral certainty makes him obnoxious at times, but it certainly doesn’t make him wrong.

“Some people misunderstood Harvey’s character and thought it was a tale of two cultures,” Szabo says. “Arnold is an angry man — I think this is the most important part of his character. And Harvey, who is also an angry man and a great actor, could show this very well. The great thing is that they both wanted to defend their character. And it was quite a fight.”