With your forbearance, one more take on Schindler's list: My first misgivings arose, before the film started, when I noticed the large number of people with popcorn boxes. Everyone knows what this film is about. A Hollywood director speaking about the unspeakable, making us think about the unthinkable, showing us what we really don't want to see -- was this going to be business as usual? No more than thirty minutes into the film I was thinking about two things. I remembered seeing Gentlemen's Agreement, the first major studio film to deal with anti-semitism, and my reaction to it. I was used to seeing films about prejudice against blacks and feeling empathy. How different it was, as a Jew, to feel identity with the victim. Well, not quite. That film was, after all, about a righteous Christian journalist, appalled by anti-semitism, who passes himself off as a Jew to write a story about bigotry. The movie really wasn't about me, it was about them. Still, it was a kind of a breakthrough. As I watched Schindler's List, something dawned on me. In so many films about the oppression of blacks, even recent ones, either a subtext or the main thread of the story is about how this oppression transforms a white person, who is then motivated to do good. The white person is then thanked, maybe honored by the blacks. And that's what these films are actually about, which the audience usually "gets." I knew this intellectually, but I never felt it so viscerally as when I was seeing Schindler's List. For here was Hollywood finally confronting the Holocaust, head-on, and what was the film _really_ about? It's the story of how a gentile redeems himself, comes to see the error of his ways, and does good, for which he finally gets the "gratitude" that Ben Kingsley has so masterfully withheld throughout the picture. Goddam it if it wasn't the ennobled white man being thanked by the blacks again. Did Spielberg make a conscious decision that this was the only way the general public could take in or accept a Holocaust film? Or was he simply caught up by the power of the story and decided that he wanted to film this book? Which is not to say that Oscar Schindler's salvation isn't a beautiful story. For that matter, I usually cry at the end of Dickens' Christmas Carol. I love it when Scrooge is transformed. In a tough world, we need to hang on to the possibility of redemption and salvation. I cried a little at the end of Schindler's List. That last scene in which the real "Schindler's Jews" visit his grave, accompanied by actors from the film, was genuinely touching. But, strange to me, at least, it was the only time I was moved to tears. And what of Spielberg's Holocaust? The photography is vivid, he clearly went to great pains to make it historically accurate and did not flinch from portraying terrible things, and the sound deserves an Academy Award. But I was so aware of the technology employed that even with the great acting -- and I credit Spielberg with eliciting it -- it did not shake me. For example, I can never recall seeing a scene in which a person is shot that seemed so "real." But that was what dominated my senses: how Spielberg achieved the effect. Nor does he refrain from slickness, at least early on, where there is dialogue that is as snappy as any in a Howard Hawks film. The scene in Auschwitz where the women are herded into what we expect to be a gas chamber was pure manipulation, a la Hitchcock. Yes, I clenched the armrests on my seat as they hoped for water but expected gas -- something like I did when Janet Leigh made the mistake of taking a shower at the Bates Motel in Psycho. But surely Spielberg did not think that he was showing us what it _really_ felt like to be the women as they awaited their fate. Or did he? By the movie's end I realized that all those people munching popcorn as they were supposedly about to gaze into the abyss unconsciously knew something that I didn't. And, having skipped lunch, I went out and had a good dinner. I hope the picture will make many people more aware of the Holocaust and fight the forces of malevolence and bigotry that would deny its truth and horror. I think it might, just as Gentlemen's Agreement probably helped, to some extent, to fight anti-semitism. But it is hardly the bold and unflinching look at this terrible time that many have made it out to be. I guess Spielberg will finally get his Academy Award. But, given what is in the foreground of his film, there is more than a little irony that the prize he covets should be called "Oscar."