Israël (1919)

Overview

Thibault de Croucy campaigns against the Jews, in the circle of rue Royale, before learning that he is the son of one of them: the prominent banker Gotlieb had been his mother's lover — an adaptation of an Henri Bernstein play first presented in Paris in 1908. The legendary French director André Antoine, working in Italy after the war, struggles to import his usual style, remaining close to the Italian melodramas of the 1910s. Taking a more incisive path than Bernstein, he frontally accuses the Catholic Church of being responsible for antisemitism. Not received well by Italian critics, the film's release is short-lived. A unique element was found by Philippe Esnault in the collections of the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome in 1973 and served as the basis for a 2005 restoration.