Eli Wallach steals horses from the army's herds. The army steals horses from everyone else. David Opatoshu sells horses he knows he doesn't have so his sister can have a dowry and make a good marriage; and hot revolutionary Jane Birkin wears a white lace dress to a secret meeting in a muddy field -- I suppose the servants will clean it. This movie doesn't seem to me a story so much as a slice of life, and its contradictory absurdities less funny than the sort of disorganized thinking that comes with the Us-Against-Them mentality, reflected in the set design and trying to sneak a stolen horse out of a brothel by having Lainie Kazan expose her decolletage to Yul Brynner.
This absurd and old-fashioned comedy about Cossacks and Jews might have been a minor success played by the Yiddisher Bund in Warsaw in 1935 (my grandfather's second wife would have had fun in the Lainie Kazan role), or on 2nd Avenue in New York. By 1971, if the audience wanted to see something about Jews in Tsarist Russia, they could see FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, which was a lot more approachable.
This absurd and old-fashioned comedy about Cossacks and Jews might have been a minor success played by the Yiddisher Bund in Warsaw in 1935 (my grandfather's second wife would have had fun in the Lainie Kazan role), or on 2nd Avenue in New York. By 1971, if the audience wanted to see something about Jews in Tsarist Russia, they could see FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, which was a lot more approachable.