His Wife's Lover is a tale of two wagers, acomic-operetta with fascinating Faustian overtones and inversions.Worldly Second Avenue matinee idol Eddie Wien (Ludwig Satz) falls forthe innocent and adoring costume-deliverer Golde Blumberg. Her boss, Mr.Stein, disappointed in love and contemptuous of all women, bets Eddiethat "she's not better than any other woman"; given theopportunity, he claims, she will give herself in marriage to anyrepellent dodderer with money. Too often we see the victims of Europe's"war against the Jews" depicted as symbols of a people, anancient people, rather than as persons who in all their individual andcontemporary ways were exactly as we are individual and contemporarytoday. The value of His Wife's Lover, with its wit and ribaldcontemporaneity, is the putting to the lie of that medievalizingcalumny. Filmed in New York by and for the generation of Jewish NewYorkers that'd pretty much just come off the boat, His Wife's Loverdemonstrates just how twentieth-century a crowd this was. No remote thembut an us. --Ken Jacobs (excerpted)