review for His People on AllMovie

His People was among the earliest serious dramas from a major studio (Universal) to deal with life among the Jewish poor in America -- for that reason alone, it's a movie of major interest to contemporary viewers, especially when one takes into consideration Hollywood's general tendency to shy away from Jewish-oriented subject matter, for fear of calling attention to the ethnicity of most of the men who founded the major studios. But beyond its value as an artifact of its time -- and it does vividly capture aspects of Jewish life on the dramatic screen that were true to contemporary life from the 1880's into the 1920's and beyond -- it is still a superb film. Director Edward H. Sloman was renowned for being able to get supremely naturalistic performances out of his actors and here, with a cast led by Rudolph Schildkraut (and including two future directors, Arthur Lubin and Robert Gordon), he outdoes himself. One quickly forgets the "fourth wall" of cinema in watching these performers work, and what's even more effective with modern viewers is that the dialogue -- on inter-titles, of course -- is also very much from life, and perfectly fits the nuances of the performances. We even get a performance by Edgar Kennedy in a dramatic context, in a dramatic role as Nolan, the local tout who becomes Sammy Cominsky's manager. Of course, the movie also benefits from an extraordinarily durable story -- the plot of His People is just as relevant in the twenty-first century as it was in 1925, and the performances and direction (including a lot of very lively and striking visuals) make it viable as viewing more than 80 years later, even as a silent. Indeed, this is one of that relative handful of silents that allows one to quickly forget that we're watching a silent movie -- it pulls you in from the opening frames depicting life on New York's Lower East Side and never lets you go. In the latter regard, this is also a brilliant movie about New York, and not just about New York's Jewish immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries -- about a side of life that's too seldom chronicled but had as much to do with the making and running of the city as the careers of all the mayors, governors, and presidents who passed through the city on their way to biggest things.