In the following article, Farber evaluates the film version of The Fixer, finding that it "inherits all of the weaknesses" of the "disastrous" novel that preceded it.
The movies invariably "discover" a novelist just after he produces his poorest work. Bernard Malamud is a gifted writer, and The Assistant seems to me a remarkable achievement, subtly controlled, tartly observed, harrowing, yet a genuinely poetic and compassionate vision of human pain. In The Fixer Malamud abandoned a world he knew firsthand to grapple with the Jewish Problem and the indomitabihty of the human spirit: a fictional-ization of the case of Mendel Beilis, a Jew accused of the ritual murder of a child in czarist Russia. The result was a pretty disastrous novel, but a natural for the best-seller list, with just enough pretension for the Pulitzer committee.....
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