Cheap Hester Street (DVD) (Carol Kane, Steven Keats, Mel Howard) (Joan Micklin Silver) Price

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Customer Reviews of Hester Street

Warm, touching and thoroughly delightful
This film tells the story of a young Russian Jewish immigrant woman, excellently played by Carol Kane, who arrives in New York's crowded Lower East Side slums at the turn of the century. She has come to join her husband, whose stay in America has resulted in a new love interest and disenchantment with his old-world wife's traditional ways. But they have a boarder in their tiny apartment--a traditional Jewish man whose dedication to Talmudic study draws the wife's interest as her marriage crumbles. The film vividly portrays the sense of the teeming slums and tenements of the time, the problems of the dislocated immigrants struggling to preserve their culture while adapting to a new one. It is both an entertaining story of personal triumph--Carol Kane is a winning heroine--and an interesting historical period. If you are descended from immigrants from any country, you owe it to yourself to see this. END

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Carol Kane deserved the Oscar!
Oscar Nominee Carol Kane gives a brilliant performance as Gitl, the wife of an immigrant, Jake, who moved to America and has embraced the culture. When Gitl and his son Joey arrive he is not sure what to do with his life. All through the film we want to smack Jake and feel sorry for Gitl, but in the end Gitl finds a way to become victor instead of victim. Carol Kane shines in this jewel of a role that she pours her heart and soul into. Kane may have won the Oscar if either the picture was released to more theaters or it they had spent more money on a campaign. She deserved the Oscar over Louise Fletcher for her SUPPORTING performance.

1975 ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATION:
BEST ACTRESS-CAROL KANE

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Refreshingly Real
The relationships between the characters and their individual personalities in this lovely film are more complex than the editorial review would lead you to believe. The immigrant wife, so "green" and inexperienced, reveals a quiet strength and determination that at first is unsuspected. She will not be taken advantage of and one suspects that, although she asks for her new husband's advice at the end of the film, she will listen politely and then do exactly as she thinks is best: and will probably become a sucessful proprietor of their store. She has a lot of guts and intelligence that could only come to fruition in America. Carol Kane's character is a woman to be admired. The other characters deftly portray other immigrant types: some with ambition, those who want to be assimilated as soon as possible, those who cling to their old-world traditions. Although the people in the movie are Russian Jews, their experiences in dealing with a new country are undoubtedly universal.