User Reviews

Really a great movie. To me it goes beyond the realm of a documentary, being personal, intimate and human. It is the story of people, people who worked there, some for much of their lives, and of people who grew up in a family business.

This would work beautifully if it was fiction, but it is not. You watch the arc of a mans life as he starts out poor and marginalized in Poland, learns to work hard, comes to the US with nothing and begins to build a very personal business, with a doggedly intense work ethic, never forgetting to remain connected to his workers and his customers.

It is also a story of mortality and life itself as the characters in the film, interviewed over years grow old before your eyes, and the questions of what really matters in life and what a life comes to in the end are splayed out on the screen for all to see. I found this feature very moving and would see it again in a heart beat.

If you have eaten at the original Nathan's it is surely an ode to the many many years of good food and unique atmosphere that became a part of many of our lives. Even if you have just bought them in the supermarket, choosing them over other brands that lie side by side, it fills in the human aspect of what this food is and who made it.

Nathan's has been a part of my life for a very long time, and now, I know a lot more about why. And maybe, just a little more about life.

This movie contains the whole of the immigrant experience in America throughout the 20th century. it's a movie about family, betrayals, friendships, loyalty, work ethic, father and son relationships and the rise and fall of Coney Island as told through a polish immigrant's hot dog stand turned empire.

Nathan Handwerker is the man who traded his life for success in business. so dedicated was he to making Nathan's what it eventually became that all else fell by the wayside. praise and encouragement to those around him was in short supply. as one of his former employees states the best one could hope for from Nathan was silence as that meant he had nothing else to complain about. it doesn't mean he was a joyless man-he and his longtime wife raised children and many of those same former employees have nothing but kind things to say about him later on. but like any driven man he was not happy unless tending to business mostly at the cost of all else and along the way jealousies between himself and his brothers as well as one son (who shunned Nathan's entirely and opened his own restaurant) created fissures in the foundations that eventually took the one time Coney Island staple down. the company went public, fancy offices were opened in times square, franchises were licensed out that didn't work mostly because Nathan-who never approved of any of this in the first place- couldn't watch everything and was too old to effectively do so at that point anyway.

So much of "Famous Nathan" is so moving it feels as if it were being told to you be your own grandparents and elderly aunts and uncles. through old videotapes and audio only sessions recorded from the 50s to the 80s these people (who are often hilarious in a way only old Brooklynites can be) are candid in such an intimate way that the director and grandson of Nathan himself-Lloyd Handwerker-effectively becomes our surrogate brother through what could be a million different immigrants tales of success and failure in the new world in the early, middle and later 20th century. best movie i've seen in 2015.