In 2005–06, Menahem Golan, a film mogul in Israel and later in the United States, sat down for a series of lengthy interviews.
“Once he started talking about cinema, his eyes lit up,” said Shmulik Duvdevani, a film professor who with a student conducted the interviews at Golan’s office in Tel Aviv and home in Jaffa.
The conversations totaled 15 hours and are part of a project, the Israeli Cinema Testimonial Database, documenting the early decades of the country’s film industry.
“You can call him the father of popular Israeli cinema, films meant for mass audiences: comedies, melodrama, action,” said Duvdevani, who teaches at Tel Aviv University and Jerusalem’s Sam Spiegel Film and Television School. “He helped to build the Israeli film industry.”
Golan began his career in Israeli theater, but discovered his calling as a movie director and producer in the 1960s and ‘70s in a genre known as “bourekas films” that depicted Ashkenazi and Sephardi characters engaged in ethnicity-based misunderstandings and conflict.
Few Israelis made any styles of movies then, and little appreciation — let alone funds — existed for high production values. Sound quality was so poor that subtitles were sometimes a necessity. Shots that belonged on the cutting-room floor remained in the film.
But the genre was “an important stage” in Israeli cinema’s development, said Rami Kimche, a professor at Ariel University and author of a 2023 English-language book, Israeli Bourekas Film: Their Origins and Legacy.
And while Golan, the son of immigrant parents from Poland, might not have intended to break social barriers with films portraying Mizrachi Jews, he recognized them as part of his ticket-buying audience.
“He was a businessman, a theater man, a producer. He was important because he was the first,” Kimche said.
Kazablan, a 1973 bourekas musical Golan directed based on a play and a previous film, was “a major, major production, definitely was groundbreaking and was the peak of his work,” said Isaac Zablocki, director of the New York-based Israel Film Center. Golan directed three other bourekas films: Fortuna, Aliza Mizrachi and Katz V’Carasso.
Golan’s best-known movie in the genre was one he produced: Sallah Shabati, starring Chaim Topol and directed by Ephraim Kishon. It garnered Israel’s first nomination for an Academy Award, in 1964, in the foreign-film category.
Three other Golan works earned foreign-film Oscar nominations: I Love You Rosa (1972), The House on Chelouche Street (1973) and Operation Thunderbolt (1977), which told of the previous year’s rescue by the Israel Defense Forces of hostages held in Entebbe, Uganda.
In 1979, Golan moved to Hollywood, where he and his cousin, Yoram Globus, bought a studio, Cannon Films, and set out to make blockbusters on the world’s largest stage.
Their lead actors included Robert Mitchum, Sean Connery, Rock Hudson, Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, Faye Dunaway, Martin Sheen, Roger Moore, Rod Steiger, Donald Sutherland, Shelley Winters, Maximilian Schell, Jon Voight, Walter Matthau, Alan Bates, Isabella Rosselini, Sally Field, Michael Caine, Kim Basinger, Ellen Burstyn and a young Meryl Streep. Tough guys Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris performed in multiple Cannon films — and Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme also starred. So did two global figures: opera singer Placido Domingo and ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Noted directors signed on, too: Lina Wertmuller, Robert Altman, John Frackenheimer, John Cassavetes and Roman Polanski.
Ruth Golan remembers buying a beautiful, long dress to attend a screening of her father’s 1984 film, Ordeal by Innocence. Not just any screening, but one held at a London theater, in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. Golan was seated beside the queen. He was instructed not to wear a wristwatch, lest it inadvertently tangle on the monarch’s dress, his daughter said.
As girls, Ruth and her two sisters hung around Golan’s movie sets. She met actress Gila Almagor — and Michal Bat-Adam, who played the title role in I Love You Rosa and with whom she’s remained friends. Later on, she met Stallone, Voight and some of the other American stars working for her father.
While Cannon didn’t release critically acclaimed films, many turned profits. The studio certainly was a sequel factory: Lemon Popsicle and its six sequels, four sequels to Death Wish, four Ninja films, Delta Force and two sequels, Emmanuelle VII, Superman IV, Missing in Action 3, Exterminator 2, Breakin’ 2, Missing in Action 2 and Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.
“Sometimes there was money; sometimes, not. Sometimes we had a home; sometimes, not. It wasn’t stable, but it was wonderful — up to a point,” Ruth Golan said.
Golan, said Zablocki, made films on the cheap, what once were called B movies. As an example, Zablocki cited the “low production quality” of Superman IV, which included scenes of Superman flying that looked “so much more fake than” in the previous three films.
But Golan thought big. He even built a studio in Neve Ilan, west of Jerusalem, intending to draw international directors to make films in Israel. His own The Delta Force, starring Norris, was filmed at the studio, but not its two sequels.
“He was interested in making a Hollywood in Israel,” Duvdevani said.
The international film studio at Neve Ilan didn’t last, but a stronger Israeli film industry eventually emerged. “It feels like an important building block,” Zablocki said.
Israel itself was a sequel in Golan’s life. He returned to the country for good in the 1990s and was awarded the 1999 Israel Prize, given for lifetime achievement. Golan died in Jaffa 10 years ago this month. The National Library of Israel has an extensive photograph collection documenting Golan’s career.
“He was a loving father, but also was busy with his career,” Ruth Golan said. “He loved what he did.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected].
