By Peter Keough

Racism and anti-Semitism on trial in The Goldman Case

The Goldman Case. Directed by Cédric Kahn. Opens October 18 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and on October 25 at the West Newton Cinema.

Arieh Worthalter as Pierre Goldman in a scene from The Goldman Case. Photo: NYFF

Judging from a letter that’s read at the beginning of Cédric Kahn’s conventional but fiery true-life courtroom drama The Goldman Case, the defendant of the title, Pierre Goldman, is quite a handful. In this brief he threatens to dismiss his defense lawyer Georges Kiejman (Arthur Harari), accusing him of being an “armchair Jew” who has taken the case because it will bring him publicity and adulation from leftist groupies. But, as the furious Kiejman points out, all of those accusations might well be directed at Goldman himself, a failed revolutionary and petty criminal who in 1975 is being tried again for four robberies, one involving the murder of two bystanders.

At the time of the trial, despite a life of self-destructive failure, Goldman had become the toast of liberal celebrities and admired by members of the French intelligentsia, including Simone Signoret and Jean-Paul Sartre. Like American radicals such as Eldridge Cleaver and his 1968 book Soul on Ice, Goldman has garnered fame through an eloquent and rousing memoir, Dim Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France (1975), which he wrote in prison. This notoriety, plus evidence revealed in the memoir, has led to the relitigating of the charges.

Played in an arresting performance by Arieh Worthalter, a kind of cross between John Garfield and Joe Pesci, Goldman comes off as truculent but vulnerable, arrogant but self-loathing. A lengthy recap of his biography in the form of a cross-examination of the defendant shows him as the son of Polish-born Jews who were heroes in the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation. Feeling inadequate in comparison to their deeds, Goldman vowed to become a revolutionary himself, traveling to Cuba to offer unwanted help to actual Communist guerillas. He returned to France in time to disdain — as dilettantes — the student rebels who took part in the May 1968 uprising. He then joined the Communist guerillas in Venezuela and returned again to France when the movement there collapsed. In Paris he pursued a life of excess and dissipation financed by a life of crime. The robberies he admits, but he insists that he never harmed, let alone killed, anyone.

The case for Goldman seems at first to go well, despite his courtroom outbursts, which the exasperated Kiejman tries ineffectually to rein in, declaiming the racism of the police and the justice system. But Goldman’s accusations prove well-founded once the witnesses deliver their testimony. Those who are white reveal their racism under Kiejman’s (and Goldman’s!) cross examination. And the non-white witnesses (Goldman was married to Christiane Succab-Goldman, a West Indian journalist, and his alibi was backed by his brother-in-law) report how they were subjected to police pressure and abusive interrogations.

Such exchanges aside, a no-frills courtroom drama might seem rather dull fare. But as seen in other films, such as Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (2023) or Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022), the rules for such judicial procedures in France are apparently a bit more freewheeling than for those in the US. At times the goings on resemble an episode of the Jerry Springer Show, with partisans of Goldman erupting into intimidating demonstrations on behalf of their hero, countered by outbursts from the pro-prosecution and police contingent. It is a tense confrontation between extremes that seems ready to explode at any moment.

Then there is the largely unspoken matter of the plight of Holocaust survivors and their children in a society that, not so long ago, had been run by Nazi collaborators. Goldman’s lawyer Kiejman wants to steer clear of that issue, as well as all the other political complications. He strives to focus on the facts of the case; ironically, Goldman insists on the same while taking every opportunity to turn the trial into a partisan circus.

Kiejman’s reticence might be due to his similarities to his client. Both are the sons of Polish Jews persecuted by the Nazis but have taken different paths in dealing with this traumatic background. They resemble the old gangster movie convention of brothers who came from identical straitened circumstances but take different paths, one choosing to become an outlaw and the other joining the establishment as a cop, lawyer, or priest. In the end, though, Kiejman puts these reservations aside and delivers eloquent closing remarks that present the past’s tortured legacy as a prime exhibit in the prosecution’s case.

In the end — at the risk of [spoilers!] (the events in the film occurred five decades ago) — after a parade of compromised witnesses and Kiejman’s final argument, the fiery, failed rebel with a cause is acquitted. Perhaps Goldman might have fared better had he been convicted, for, as the film’s epilogue reveals, less than three years after his release he was assassinated by unknown assailants. Kahn might well consider a sequel to this compelling look back at an almost forgotten “trial of the century.”

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).