Bye Bye Braverman movie storyline. When idealistic minor author Leslie Braverman dies suddenly from a heart attack at the age of 41, his four best friends decide to attend his funeral. The quartet of Jewish intellectuals drawn from the four corners of Manhattan consists of public relations writer Morroe Rieff from the Upper East Side, poet Barnet Weinstein from the Lower East Side, book reviewer Holly Levine from the Lower West Side, and Yiddish writer (and chronic complainer) Felix Ottensteen from the Upper West Side.
The men have been friends since their youth. They agree to meet at Christopher Park on Sheridan Square, a Greenwich Village landmark, from which they travel in Levine’s cramped Volkswagen Beetle. Due to confusion and bad directions from Braverman’s widow, the men attend the wrong funeral but finally arrive at the cemetery in time for the burial. There is an extensive running discussion along the way about everything from philosophical observations regarding death to the relative merits of classic comic book characters, all while maintaining a strongly Jewish comedic tone emphasizing irony and sarcasm.
Rieff, who emerges as the central character, periodically experiences absurdist fantasy episodes or daydreams involving his own mortality, eventually delivering a soliloquy to a vast array of gravestones bringing the dead up to date on what they have missed lately.
The character Leslie Braverman never actually appears, by flashback or otherwise, and is known only through descriptions and references to him by other characters. (Braverman’s coffin is shown briefly, with him presumably inside, at the cemetery.) While Braverman is dead from the outset in both the book and the movie, there are occasions in the book but not the movie where his own words are quoted, often at considerable length as from a letter.
Bye Bye Braverman is a 1968 American comedy film directed by Sidney Lumet. The screenplay by Herbert Sargent was adapted from the 1964 novel To an Early Grave by Wallace Markfield. Starring are George Segal, Jack Warden, Joseph Wiseman, Jessica Walter, Phyllis Newman, Zohra Lampert, Godfrey Cambridge, Alan King, Anthony Holland, Susan Wyler and Leib Lensky. It was released on February 21, 1968.
Bye Bye Braverman (1968)
Directed by: Sidney Lumet
Starring: George Segal, Jack Warden, Joseph Wiseman, Jessica Walter, Phyllis Newman, Zohra Lampert, Godfrey Cambridge, Alan King, Anthony Holland, Susan Wyler, Leib Lensky
Screenplay by: Wallace Markfield, Herbert Sargent
Cinematography by: Boris Kaufman
Film Editing by: Gerald B. Greenberg
Costume Design by: Anna Hill Johnstone
Set Decoration by: John Godfrey
Art Direction by: Ben Kasazkow
Music by: Peter Matz
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures, Seven Arts
Release Date: February 21, 1968
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