Movie Review: Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
Knight Ridder/Tribune
Aug 07, 2009
YOO-HOO, MRS. GOLDBERG: B+
A fascinating account of a unique pop-culture phenomenon, "Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg" seems at first like a mockumentary.
Who would believe that a pioneering radio and television program was written and produced by a matronly Jewish-American woman who played the starring role, and that it featured the trials and tribulations of a Jewish, working-class family living in a Bronx apartment?
Meet Gertrude Berg. Berg wrote and produced every episode of the show she created. Her character, Molly Goldberg, was second only to Eleanor Roosevelt in popularity in Depression-era America.
Writer-director Aviva Kempner, whose previous efforts include the "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg" (1998), is not going to win awards for originality of style. "Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg" is a standard mix of archival footage, family snapshots, talking-head interviews with surviving cast members, relatives and iconic TV producer Norman Lear and others and clips from vintage radio and TV programs.
No less an eminence than Brooklyn-born Ruth Bader Ginsburg talks about the impact "The Goldbergs" had on her.
At a time when another popular radio show, "Amos 'n Andy," featured white actors playing the roles of blacks, Berg hired a cast with experience in Yiddish theater. For one episode, Berg had a real rabbi perform the Passover service on-air.
During the rise of Nazism, while the German American Bund was marching and heiling its Fuhrer and Father Coughlin was broadcasting anti-Semitic sermons, "The Goldbergs" ruled.
Most interestingly, the specificity of the program, its limited setting and characters and focus on a one-of-a-kind Jewish family meeting the myriad challenges of lower-middle-class American life is precisely what made it so universal.
"They were just like my family," says a female African-American fan in the movie. Ditto for a Greek-American woman. If you were the child of first- or second-generation immigrants, you probably had more in common with the Goldbergs than not.
Kempner makes a good case that long before Lucy and Desi, Berg created the TV sitcom format that would go on to produce such spinoffs as "All in the Family," "Good Times," "The Cosby Show," "Seinfeld" and "Friends."
Berg was the Oprah Winfrey of her day. The winner of the first Emmy award for Best Actress, she made the transition to television in 1949, but ran into trouble when Philip Loeb, the union-activist actor who had played her husband, was targeted in the McCarthy era. Loeb later committed suicide.
But like other families that lose a beloved member, "The Goldbergs" survived. In many ways, "Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg" is the story of America.
Not rated. At Kendall Square Cinema.
("Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg" contains no objectionable material.)
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Copyright 2009 by Knight Ridder/Tribune
