Lilli Palmer stars as Tisa Kepes, a Hungarian immigrant to New York City in 1905, working at four jobs to save enough money to pay for her father's passage to the United States, including one at a tie-manufacturing sweat shop owned by Mr. Brumbach (Akim Tamiroff), who is giddy at the prospect of passing his citizenship examination with the tutoring of Mark Denek (Sam Wanamaker). After a successful stage career, this is the first screen appearance for Wanamaker, considered by Warner Brothers as a successor to John Garfield in their long progression of proletarian films, and he gives a strong performance as an ambitious novice politician in Gotham's notorious fourth ward, led here by assemblyman Dugan (Alan Hale). Many of the main characters reside in a boarding house run by Mrs. Faludi (Stella Adler, in a rare appearance) and inevitably Mark and Tisa fall in love with Tisa deciding to use part of her savings to finance quixotic Mark's notion that he will become a successful attorney by completing a mail order course, thereby jeopardizing her ability to reunite with her father. This is a sweet natured work, directed ably by Elliott Nugent, but is somewhat hampered by a weak script, its dialogue in particular failing to enhance an ambitious series of subplots with which Nugent must deal, although scenes involving the growing mutual attraction of the lovers are, on the evidence, an indication of what might have been a far more effective production. Filmed in black and white, TISA depicts, on no small budget, a realistic depiction of the first decade of the twentieth century as experienced by a wide range of idealistic European emigrants, and is replete with that optimism which one might expect from new residents to America.
Review of My Girl Tisa
