Jacob Westervelt (sheriff)
Jacob Westervelt (1794–1881) is often confused with his brother-in-law John Jacob V.B. Westervelt (1805–1866), who was a Deputy Sheriff under him, and subsequently High Sheriff of New York City himself too (1846–1849), as well as Assistant Alderman from the 16th Ward (1844–1846). Another namesake is Jacob Aaron Westervelt (1800–1879), the shipbuilder, Alderman from the 13th Ward and later Mayor of New York City (1853–1855).
Bye Bye Braverman
Stanford University professor Steven J. Zipperstein, writing about the author Isaac Rosenfeld, has stated that the character of Leslie Braverman was modeled on the real-life Rosenfeld, who died of a heart attack at age 38 in 1956. Zipperstein notes that Rosenfeld's premature death in failed circumstances is mentioned prominently in the memoirs of many who, like Markfield, were in the "Partisan Review" literary circle, including Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, and William Phillips. Rosenfeld has also been acknowledged, according to Zipperstein, as the model for the character of King Dahfu in the 1959 novel "Henderson the Rain King" by Saul Bellow; Rosenfeld and Bellow had been friends since their teenage years.
In her "New York Times" review, Renata Adler described the film as "a movie about New York Jews, which—by some unlucky mixed perspective of affection and satire—turns into a pogrom . . . Sidney Lumet gets a chance to explore some Brooklyn neighborhoods and to show some Orthodox Jews in their relative Old Testament purity (the movie seems to be, in part, a lampoon of Reform Jewry, a bit intramural for a picture of this size) . . . In the end, though, with "The Group" and "Bye Bye Braverman", [he] has probably exhausted the cinema possibilities of drawing people together out of separate lives to attend funerals in semisatirical circumstances. It hardly ever works in fiction, and it does not seem the best vehicle for his movies at all."