In Memoriam: Suki Lahav

Bruce Springsteen and Suki Lahav, 1974.

Bruce Springsteen’s back-to-back 1974 and 1975 masterpieces of New Jersey/New York life, “The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle” and “Born to Run,” were records of romantically heightened youth. They captured their creator in a musical theatre mode, pulling as much from West Side Story as Elvis, a mode he would move on from, and a mode defined by a markedly different version of The E Street Band. When he plays songs of this period in concert now, I am always happy to hear them, but I confess, deep down, there is also always a little twinge of disappointment because they are not quite the same. They can’t be. The person he was, the way he felt, how the group sounded, that time has passed. Those records were defined as much by David Sancious’s piano cum Roy Bittan’s piano as Bruce Springsteen’s guitar; they were also defined by Suki Lahav’s violin. Her instrument appears only once on an official Springsteen recording, though that one time is significant, the opening to “Jungleland” that draws back the curtain on something mythic. To get the full effect of Lahav’s violin in the band, you have to listen to the live recordings of the era, like the one from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania’s Main Point in early 1975, recorded for posterity by Philadelphia’s WMMR, which was the first Springsteen bootleg I ever owned and crucial in my education of his canon, going to show that he was so much more than the Reagan-era image that still, to a large degree, defines him. At that Main Point show, Lahav is his only accompaniment on an otherwise solo piano version of “Incident on 57th Street” and she is the most key contributor on a cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Want You” that, in my honest opinion, they do better than The Bard himself. That’s the song I listened to first when I read that Lahav had died on April 1st in her native Israel at the age of 74 from cancer.

Lahav being in The E Street Band was some matter of fate. She was married to Louis Lahav, who was Springsteen’s recording engineer in the early years, and when Bruce was looking for a violinist to join the band, he enlisted her. When Jon Landau essentially assumed command of the Springsteen operation not long after, virtually sidelining his previous producer Mike Appel in the process, the Lahavs went their own way. “We were really Mike’s people,” she would tell The Jerusalem Post in 2007 with no detectable notes of bitterness. She and Lahav returned to Israel, divorced in 1977, and going by her Hebrew name of Tzruya, by all accounts, Lahav fashioned a long and successful career in the arts there. For the next 25 years, as Springsteen devoted himself to straight ahead rock and roll, he rarely utilized the violin, but turned toward a more rustic sound around the turn of the century and invited Soozie Tyrell into the fold where she has remained for two decades-plus. Suki Lahav, on the other hand was in The E Street Band from September 1974 to March 1975. In the immense text of Bruce Springsteen, she is barely a blip. But then, the period in which she featured prominently was the one where Springsteen was saying goodbye to his youth, immortalized on “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” on which Lahav sang backing vocals, and that’s the thing about youth, seven months can feel like forever. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: History of the World – Part 1 (1981)

Upon its release in the summer of 1981, Mel Brooks’s “History of the World – Part 1” received mixed, often harsh, reviews. “Rambling, undisciplined, sometimes embarrassing failure,” the esteemed Roger Eber wrote in a two-star review that reads like a one-star, lambasting it for being “unfunny (in its) bad taste.” Yet, what Ebert viewed as its worst quality, is what The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael saw as its best, commending his “audacity – his treating cruelty and pain as a crazy joke.” Having watched “History of the World – Part 1” again for the first time since the last time, whenever that was, rented on VHS, so a long time ago, I side with Kael, even if I acknowledge all the ways in which it comes up short. In fact, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I rewatched this and then rewatched “The Producers” right after, and I was struck by something Kael also alludes to, how in both, Brooks is sort of a Broadway producer disguised as movie director: that is, he essentially stages scenes for the camera rather than staging scenes with the camera.

“History of the World – Part 1” is not so much a history of the world as random bits and bobs pulled from both the Bible and history texts (was the dinosaur eating the caveman a dig at creationism, I honestly have no idea), an overview of the Old Testament and then extended riffs on the Roman Empire, the Inquisition, and finally, the French Revolution. Indeed, if Ebert and Kael agree, it’s on the lack of narrative propulsion. “His ‘history’ framework doesn’t have an approach or point of view,” Ebert writes, while Kael deems the whole thing “a jamboree, a shambles.” And in Brooks’s first-person New York Times accounting of how he conceived of the movie, that’s exactly how it reads, as a jamboree, a shambles, everything just sort of randomly occurring to him in different places, a collage thrown together. It’s not just that “History of the World – Part 1” is uneven, that it hits and misses in its gags, but that it feels longer than its not-that-long hour-and-thirty-two minutes, owing to the kind of dead space that is unacceptable in a rapid-fire comedy. It can occasionally seem as if Brooks is trying to marshal all the elements of his massive sets as much as he is trying to land a joke.

In his New York Times piece, Brooks notes that his overriding theme was the meek will not inherit the earth, a good one, and though it often comes across like he’s just blindly finding his way into that theme as opposed to manifesting it with razor sharp precision, when he gets there, the jokes hit with guillotine-force. As Emperor Nero, Dom DeLuise is giving what I will cite as retroactively one of 1981’s best performances, a debauched infant that cuts to the heart of the matter in a way no staid sword and sandals epic ever could while Brooks’s “It’s good to the king” schtick crudely but effectively portrays the monarchy as “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Nothing is better, though, than Brooks transforming The Inquisition into a big Busby Berkeley-style musical number to comically, sharply evoke a truth that America has been in the process of living all 2026: state-sanctioned violence is just show business. 

In Memoriam: James Tolkan

In early 2016, I had serendipitous back-to-back movie-viewing experiences. First, I watched the previous year’s “Bone Tomahawk,” S. Craig Zahler’s western-horror hybrid. Most people might remember it for so much gruesome violence, but I remember it most for a scene in which a gunslinger semi-squabbles with a saloon pianist over the price of playing a few songs. When you first see the pianist, slumped at his chosen instrument, head on the keys, you think for a moment that he might be dead until he pops to something like hungover half-life, epitomizing the film’s off kilter sense of humor by essentially living, so to speak, the old joke from “Ishtar: “Not dead, just resting.” The pianist was played by James Tolkan. The next movie I watched, a few days later, was 1973’s magnificent neo-noir “Friends of Eddie Coyle” in which Robert Mitchum plays a glorious sad sack career criminal informing to an ATF agent who finds himself in the crosshairs of The Man. Lo and behold, Tolkan turned up as the contact man for The Man, playing opposite the much taller Peter Boyle but lording over him in his air anyway. I could not remember the last time I had seen the then-84-year-old Tolkan in a new-to-me movie and yet, here he was in two of them, 42 years apart, both one-scene walk-offs in which he left an unmistakable footprint, and both evocative of a career as rich and varied as his life. (Contrary to the famous line about his character in “Back to the Future,” one wondering if he ever had hair, Tolkan did have hair in “Friends of Eddie Coyle” just as he had hair two years later as one Napoleon Bonaparte in Woody Allen’s “Love and Death.”)

Indeed, in reading Tolkan’s backstory upon learning of his death at the age of 94 on March 26th, as I did in this 2021 interview with the military news website We Are The Mighty, I could not believe just how much it felt like a novel. He was born in Michigan, but his family moved to Chicago where he quit school at 15 to work for the Chicago Northwestern Railroad (“which I hated,” he told We Are The Mighty) until his family relocated to Arizona where he re-enrolled in high school, graduated, and earned a football scholarship at Eastern Arizona College before joining the Navy where he made some waves as a boxer. Prior to shipping out, however, he was discharged on account of a heart condition and wound up in Iowa where he drove a cattle truck for a while, eventually attended the University of Iowa on the GI Bill and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in drama. He then literally took a Greyhound bus to New York, he would tell We Are The Mighty, with 75 bucks in his pocket to try and become an actor. He started on the stage, understudying Robert Duvall, appearing in several Broadway productions, including 1973’s “Full Circle” opposite Leonard Nimoy. In reviewing it for The New York Times, Clive Barnes would write: “James Tolkan had a marvelous scene as a recaptured prisoner, a Jewish ex‐professor from the concentration camps.” Tolkan starred in the first Broadway production of “Glengarry Glen Ross” in 1984, which I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know, and when I read this, I thought to myself, I swear, “I bet he played Dave Moss,” and turns out, he did, because can’t you hear him saying, “We’re just talking”?

“Glengarry Glen Ross” was also his last play on Broadway perhaps because in the 80s, Tolkan’s movie career blossomed, the supreme force of his 5'6" presence accentuated on the big screen, and though he was always in support, never a lead, he frequently bettered what was already good and still left a mark in what wasn’t. I saw 1987’s “Masters of the Universe” for my 10th birthday party at the Valley 3 in West Des Moines, Iowa and the only memory I retain has nothing to do with He-Man or Skeletor but Tolkan on the other side of the galactic portal as Detective Lubic. (He also co-starred in 1986’s “Armed and Dangerous,” one of the John Candy comedies of the era that my mom, my sister, and I would rent over and over.) Tolkan probably had more screen time total in that critical and box office bomb than he did in the back-to-back box office champs of 1985 and 1986, but demonstrating his gift for conveying authority, he rendered himself a Hollywood immortal, nevertheless, on account of those two movies. In the former, “Back to the Future,” he was Principal Strickland, though Tolkan did not play him as an educational leader so much as a cruel and cocky antagonist to our hero, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), like an ex-drill sergeant-type coach who became a principal for lack of a better idea. Strickland unforgettably dresses Marty down in a monologue that Tolkan delivered with such committed fury he seemed to conjure the camera’s movement, drifting closer and closer to the two men as Tolkan leans in so close to Fox that their noses practically touch. 

The next year Tolkan appeared in “Top Gun” as commanding officer of the USS Enterprise. Though he was credited onscreen as “Stinger,” that name is never said aloud, because why would it need to be given how Tolkan breathes immense life into the character all on his own in dressing down Maverick and Goose (Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards, respectively) the same way Strickland dresses down Marty McFly, coining an unlikely and profane synonym for worst case scenario along the way: “flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit outta Hong Kong.” The whole sequence, really, is nothing more than an exposition drop, explaining Maverick’s backstory and the origin and purpose of Naval Weapons Fighter School, but Tolkan does not merely sell it with maximum gusto, he transforms it into an unapologetically juicy slice of pure verbal entertainment. As much as any scene of aerial combat, Tolkan turns and burns. And at the end, when Stinger dismisses Maverick and Goose, then stops them, then wishes them luck, the way he watches them go, shoving a cigar in his mouth as he does, it’s eerie just how Tolkan effects the countenance of a school principal who know he’s gonna see those two crazy kids again after class real soon.