Harry Belafonte produced this film adaptation of Bernard Malamud's story “The Angel Levine,” a wonderfully ironic tale of an old Jewish tailor, Morris Mishkin, whose faith is tested by the appearance of a street-wise black angel named Levine. Zero Mostel plays the distraught, Job-like tailor; Ida Kaminska, his ailing wife, who improves remarkably whenever the angel Levine is around; and Belafonte, the angel who has only a short time to convince Mishkin to “forget that wing shit” and believe in him. Czech director Jan Kadar, in his American film debut, and producer Belafonte focus more on the racial issue than on the fantasy of Malamud's original story (a New York Times appraisal called it one of the few honest approaches to issues of race relations in film). Once again Kadar treats the question he posed in his internationally acclaimed film A Shop on Main Street, that of one individual's responsibility to another, here amid the continuing tensions between blacks and Jews in New York City, where “belief” comes too late to help anyone.