By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: director Jeremy Kagan, who helmed The Chosen, The Big Fix, Heroes and The Journey Of Natty Gann.
When tracing the auteurist qualities of a filmmaker’s resume, it’s easy to be thrown off by a diversity of genres. At first glance, this might make a writer or director look like a “journeyman” – a dreaded, lazy, often undeserved label that suggests a hack-like quality or lack of commitment – but if you scratch away at the surface, you can often find a thematic or stylistic throughline. Such is the case with now 79-year-old Jeremy Kagan, who has directed comedies, adventures, dramas, biopics and road movies, as well as a considerable swathe of television projects. There is, however, a strong, clearly visible strain of quirkiness that unites Kagan’s work, as well as a fondness and interest for those who live on the margins of society, unable or uninterested when it comes to the concept of conforming and fitting in. Kagan’s Jewish faith has also played a role in many of his film and TV projects.
The son of a rabbi, Jeremy Paul Kagan (as he is often credited) was born in 1945 into a Jewish family in Mount Vernon, New York. Kagan received his BA from Harvard University in 1967, and then went on to attend the newly formed New York University Graduate Institute Of Film & Television and was in the first class at The AFI Conservatory. Upon completing his studies, Kagan found his way into television, where he directed episodes of 1970s series like Nichols and Columbo and the telemovies Unwed Father (1974), Judge Dee And The Monastery Murders (1974) and Katherine (1975). Kagan made his big screen debut with 1977’s Scott Joplin, a vibrant, energetic biopic starring Billy Dee Williams as the great Ragtime composer and musician. In today’s climate, this type of material would very likely (and very appropriately) be directed by an African-American filmmaker, but Kagan has no problem connecting to the humanity of the story, and also gets great performances from his cast.
After Scott Joplin, Jeremy Kagan enjoyed a period of great productivity in the late seventies and early eighties, delivering what now stand as his most impressive and high-profile films. Now largely forgotten, 1977’s Heroes was one of the first films to deal sensitively and intelligently with the concept of PTSD and the lasting impact that the war in Vietnam had on its soldiers. Henry Winkler gives a rounded, affecting performance as Jack Dunne, an amnesiac, traumatised Vietnam veteran who escapes from a psychiatric ward in New York City with the goal of starting a business as a worm farmer in the town of Eureka, California. Joined on the road by Sally Field’s Carol Bell, who is running from an engagement with a man she’s not sure she really wants to marry, and visiting Harrison Ford’s stock car racer along the way, Jack’s eventual arrival in Eureka will reveal much of his troubled history. A shaggy-dog road movie with a lot of serious issues at its core, Heroes set the template for Kagan’s love of oddball outcasts and cleverly shrouded emotional intensity.
That type of storytelling was again at the fore for Kagan’s next film. An unusual detour into noirish 1970s conspiracy territory, 1978’s underrated The Big Fix stars Richard Dreyfuss as the shaggy and wonderfully named Moses Wine, a one-time sixties radical clinging to his rigorous, highly politicised past and now fighting the system as a private eye. When he’s hired by a former lover to investigate a political smear campaign, Moses is quickly drawn into a case in which he finds himself dangerously in over his head, while also pulled back into his old days of sixties radicalism. Kagan expertly traverses the film’s complicated mix of humour and drama, and obviously has a real infinity with Dreyfuss’s lost, burnt-out ex-activist, who stands as a truly fascinating character.
Kagan shifted gears again for 1981’s The Chosen, in which the director impressively placed his Jewish faith on centre stage. Based on the acclaimed novel by Chaim Potok, this beautifully tailored 1940s drama follows the unlikely friendship that develops between Jewish teens Danny Saunders (Unsung Auteur Robby Benson in a great performance) and Reuven Malter (superb work from incendiary talent Barry Miller, who was unforgettable in Fame and Saturday Night Fever) on the streets of Brooklyn, New York. From vastly different backgrounds and initially hostile toward each other after Danny temporarily (and accidentally) blinds Reuven in one eye during a baseball match, the pair eventually become emotionally entwined against the fevered backdrop of the establishment of the state of Israel, while also engaging in fraught conflict with their respective families. Atmospheric, evocative, finely tuned to the world of orthodox Judaism, and filled with big, hearty performances (Maximillian Schell, Rod Steiger and Ron Rifkin also star), the absorbing and consistently fascinating The Chosen is unquestionably Jeremy Kagan’s most completely realised film, and is one of the best on the often-complex nature of the Jewish faith.
Though he had no real chance of succeeding with his next film – 1983’s ill-advised sequel The Sting II, which features none of the original principal stars, and is toplined instead by Jackie Gleason and Mac Davis – Kagan still crafted something at least easily enjoyable. His 1985 effort, The Journey Of Natty Gann, however, was much, much better. Far from the girl-and-animal Disney flick that its poster might suggest, this is one of The Mouse House’s darker, grittier releases, as plucky teenager Natty Gann (the remarkable Meredith Salenger) takes the hard, tough road from Depression-era Chicago to Seattle to reunite with her father (Ray Wise), who has left her behind to pursue work. Kagan crafts incredibly grim images of the horrors of The Depression, while also featuring a heartwarming platonic friendship between Natty and Harry (a superb early performance from John Cusack), a rail-riding drifter who shows the younger girl the ropes. Another of Kagan’s criminally forgotten films, The Journey Of Natty Gann is one of the best (not always so) family films of the 1980s.
After 1989’s goofy Big Man On Campus and 1991’s fencing drama By The Sword starring Eric Roberts and F. Murray Abraham, Kagan principally directed for episodic television before eventually returning to the big screen with 2007’s Golda’s Balcony (a theatrical one-woman show starring Valerie Harper as Israeli leader and figurehead Golda Meir) and 2017’s topical drama Shot, which looks at the complex aftermath of an urban shooting. Now seemingly retired, Jeremy Kagan boasts a small but fascinatingly curated body of big screen work that resounds with a keen sense of emotional and political enquiry, and overflows with beautifully crafted characters.
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