Jaffa Pictures

The idea was to bring to life the Runyonesque characters from Menachem Talmi's tales of Jaffa. Unfortunately, although the lead character is played by Uri Gavriel, just on his way to losing all his hair and becoming one of Israel's top movie actors, his two sidekicks are played by colorless actors who seem to have come out of nowhere and never appeared on screen again. They don't hold interest. The best parts of the episodes I saw (about half of the episodes) are when the characters are talking about amusing offscreen action and offscreen characters; when the tall tales are actually acted out, they lose their charm. The authentic Jaffa settings are photographed unimaginatively, and the music is uninspired. Oddly, one of the scenes-- where a fellow with an enormous mustache shows a stag movie to a pal-- is repeated with the same actor (only an even bigger mustache) in another Uri Gavriel vehicle, The Ballad of the Weeping Spring (Balada le'aviv ha'bohe), fifteen years later.