Film review

Norman Jewison (1971)

I’d seen Norman Jewison’s film once before but not in the cinema.  (I’d also seen Fiddler on the Roof twice on stage – amateur productions, about forty years apart.)  Although there were more than a few empty seats in NFT1, watching the film on BFI’s largest screen conjured up a sense of what was once a regular event for mainstream cinema audiences – seeing a ‘big’ musical adaptation, with plenty of incident, dancing and songs already familiar, thanks to the musical’s long theatrical run or being played on the radio.  Or familiar even as hit singles:  Fiddler on the Roof‘s best-known number, ‘If I Were a Rich Man’, sung by Topol, reached number nine in the UK singles chart in 1967 – ‘Ya ba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dum’, and all that.  I was eleven at the time and the song got on my nerves; I’d no idea there was more to the show than roguish humour.

Fiddler on the Roof – book by Joseph Stein (who also did the film‘s screenplay), songs by Jerry Bock (music) and Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) – is often humorous, but it’s also tragic.  The source material is ‘Tevye the Dairyman’ and other short stories by Sholem Aleichem.  Born in Imperial Russia in 1859, Aleichem, who wrote in Yiddish, died in New York City in 1916.  He emigrated to the US in the light of the pogroms rife across the Russian Empire in the early years of the twentieth century.  Although ‘Tevye the Dairyman’ was first published in 1894, Fiddler on the Roof is set in around 1905 (in what is now Ukraine).  It ends with the eviction from the (fictional) village of Anatevka of Tevye, his family and the village’s Jewish community as a whole, and the start of their journey to new homes, often in America.

Chaim Topol, who died in 2023 at the age of eighty-seven, will be remembered as the-man-who-played-Tevye – a poor milkman with an increasingly lame horse to pull his cart round Anatevka, a couple of cows to supply the milk, a few chickens, a wife, five daughters and no sons.  According to Wikipedia, Topol estimated that, by the time he retired, he’d played the role around 3,500 times on stage, as well as in Jewison’s film.  He wasn’t the original Tevye:  Zero Mostel starred in the original Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof in 1964.  Topol’s debut as Tevye was in Tel Aviv; he then starred in Fiddler‘s first London West End production in 1967.  Mostel was a much bigger screen name than Topol in the late 1960s, especially after the success of Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1967); and Topol’s casting in Jewison’s film was quite controversial.  It now seems inconceivable with anyone else as Tevye.  Topol is tremendous.

One of the most striking things about the performance is how young Topol was at the time.  Not only Zero Mostel but also the actor who eventually took over the role from him on Broadway, as well as both the actors who followed Topol in the show’s original London run, were born in the 1910s.  Topol was born in 1935:  he was only thirty-one when he first played Tevye in his native Israel, only thirty-five when the film wrapped.  Three of Tevye’s daughters are already of marriageable age and he’s been married to Golde for twenty-five years:  he could be as young as mid-forties but his attitudes and grizzled appearance hint strongly at someone senior.  Topol embodies a man much older than himself with what seems the greatest of ease and fully:  this is ageing way beyond a bit of padding and grey hairspray.

Topol had appeared in films occasionally through the 1960s, in Israel and Hollywood.  It’s amazing, even so, that he’s thoroughly comfortable on screen in a role he’d already played many times on stage:  his movement and delivery are perfectly scaled to the camera.  Topol’s voice – spoken or singing – is musical but he never luxuriates in its richness:  he varies tone and tempo very dexterously.  He handles Tevye’s talk to God as naturally as talking to his horse and livestock, and his conversations with family and neighbours.  His short bursts of dance, in the opening number, ‘Tradition’, and ‘If I Were a Rich Man’, are wonderfully dynamic.  I could have done without the lengthy visualisation of the nightmare that Tevye invents to persuade Golde whom their eldest daughter should marry; but it’s nearly redeemed by Topol’s comedy beside his wife in bed.  His Tevye tends to be described as a force of nature, a great bear of a man, and so on.  You can see why but it’s worth pointing out that this is entirely due to the strength of Topol’s screen presence.  He wasn’t very tall – just 5’ 10”.  It was only seeing him the other year in Carol Reed’s Follow Me! (1972) that I realised he wasn’t heavy-set either in the 1970s.

There’s one other magical performance in the film, from Leonard Frey, as Motel, the poor tailor who loves Tevye’s eldest daughter, Tzeitel.  Only three years younger than Topol, Frey projects a boyish innocence that feels very authentic.  Rosalind Harris’ face sometimes suggests an introverted Barbra Streisand (never mind that’s a contradiction in terms!):  her gentle Tzeitel and the awkward, diffident Motel are right for each other; but it’s Frey who elevates the romance into a match made in heaven.  His solo, ‘Miracle of Miracles’, is far from the best song on offer yet Leonard Frey works his own small miracle with it:  Motel thoroughly believes what he’s singing; his wonderment carries all the way through to his wedding to Tzeitel, until a pogrom brutally cuts short the celebrations.

The rest of the supporting cast are a very mixed bag.  On the plus side, Neva Small gives the third daughter, Chava, more individuality than the part as written probably deserves; Paul Mann, as the wealthy, widowed butcher Lazar Wolf, who thinks he’s going to marry Tzeitel until she marries Motel, has a great face and a winning blustering pathos.  Michael Glaser (soon to add Paul to his professional name and be famous as the first half of Starsky and Hutch) does well in a difficult role – Perchik, suitor of the second daughter, Hodel, is a juvenile lead who’s also a political revolutionary.  On the negative side, Norma Crane, although she looks right enough as the matriarch Golde, is not, to put it kindly, an emotionally deft performer.  Michele Marsh is very pretty but so much a movie-musical ingénue type – her every facial expression and line reading just what you expect them to be – that she makes Hodel seem generic too.  Molly Picon is hard to take as the matchmaker, Yente.  Picon was a star of New York’s Yiddish Theater as far back as the 1920s, but her mannerisms are so practised and stagy that she bizarrely gives the impression of a Gentile actor trying to persuade you she’s Jewish.  At the other extreme, Raymond Lovelock – as Chava’s sweetheart, the young Christian farmer Fyedka – hardly seems there at all.  Louis Zorich is stiff and dull as the village constable who warns Tevye which way the wind is blowing.

Norman Jewison, despite his name, wasn’t Jewish.  There had already been clues to his film-making range, but he hadn’t tried his hand at a movie musical before and he’s sometimes outside his comfort zone.  During ‘Tradition’, when he shows the villagers going about their daily routines in rhythm to the beat of the music, Jewison is a man straining to do the musically right thing but it’s a bit primitive.  A bigger problem that develops is his handling of the choreography (adapted by Tom Abbott from Jerome Robbins’ choreography for the original Broadway show):  the camera is repeatedly too close to the action, stifling a viewer’s sense of the dancers’ movement.  A fortunate exception is the terrific sequence, during the wedding celebrations, in which four men dance, each balancing a bottle on his head throughout.  (The routine draws on both traditional Ashkenazi folk dance and Robbins’ theatrical ingenuity.)  It’s understandable that a director of recent action-thriller hits (In the Heat of the Night (1967), The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)) should succumb to the temptation (and perhaps studio pressure) to introduce a set piece like the Kyiv street demonstration in which Tsarist forces kill several demonstrators and Perchik is arrested.  This jolts the narrative out of its formal frame, though, and isn’t even very satisfying as an action sequence.  It’s a safe bet that in the theatre the characters’ reactions to what happens in Kyiv will have more dramatic power than its realisation on screen.

These add up to serious defects yet Jewison, in many other respects, does a characteristically good job.  His skill and empathy with actors ensure that spoken sequences – and some musical numbers, especially if Topol is involved – are often fluently effective.  Jewison’s flair for making a movie move does come through when Tzeitel and Motel joyfully run and tumble about the place in ‘Miracle of Miracles’.  His comic touch is seen to advantage, too.  There’s plenty of broad playing in minor roles and crowd scenes where rhubarb-rhubarbing is plain to see, but Jewison manages to make some obvious bits of crossed-wires conversation surprisingly funny – Topol thinking that Lazar Wolf is wanting to buy his cow when the butcher is asking to marry Tzeitel, everyone thinking that the exciting news of a ‘new arrival’ is Tzeitel’s second child when it’s actually her husband’s sewing machine.  For all his sustained success as a Hollywood director, Norman Jewison wasn’t renowned as a creator of memorable imagery.  Thanks in large part of Oswald Morris’s eloquent lighting, this may be Jewison’s visually most impressive film.

On its original release, Fiddler on the Roof ran three hours plus intermission, which this BFI screening also included.  The break in proceedings has the effect of reinforcing what happens to the story in its second half.  The narrative becomes a matter of working out the main themes as necessary – the erosion of tradition, the precarity of the Jewish community of Anatevka (and neighbouring villages).  Once Tevye’s eldest daughter has married a poor man, the next two sisters must violate expectations in more serious and upsetting ways.  The second daughter’s politically radical husband (also poor) is imprisoned in Siberia, and she goes there to be nearer to him.  The third daughter’s marriage to a Gentile crosses a line that Tevye can’t accept, and he disowns Chava.  Once the central family unit has fractured, the whole community is soon given notice to quit their homes and the village.  The later stages include occasional strong moments.  For example, Tevye and Hodel’s farewell scene on a bleak station platform is well staged and Michele Marsh gives Hodel’s solo, ‘Far from the Home I Love’, more feeling than comes through in the rest of her performance.  There are fewer musical numbers in Act II, though, and they mostly lack the impact of the earlier ones.  The narrative’s loss of vibrancy goes beyond the demands of a darkening storyline.

Jewison’s next film would be another musical.  Like Fiddler on the Roof, Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) turned a handsome box-office profit but enjoyed much less critical and awards success.  (Barry Dennen, who played Pontius Pilate in Jesus Christ Superstar, has a minor role in the earlier film as the village rabbi’s son.)  Jewison didn’t return to the genre a third time.  Perhaps he’d had enough; even if he hadn’t, there wasn’t much film-musical fare on offer later in the 1970s.  In the closing stages of Fiddler on the Roof, Jewison’s aptitude as a director of straight drama – in combination with evident respect for the ethnopolitical nature of his material – proves invaluable.  After ‘Anatevka’, the villagers’ mournful farewell to their home, the songs dry up entirely.  That could be seen as a weakness in the piece as a whole – an admission that its solemn themes outgrow its musical form – but Jewison makes a virtue of the silence.  A line of evicted Jews crosses a bridge, carrying whatever possessions they can carry, before crowding onto a raft, the first stage en route to life elsewhere.  These are very powerful images (not least because they can’t fail to evoke images of real Jewish transports in Europe a few decades later).

The songless climax can be read in another important way – though it won’t be obvious to everyone who watches and is held by the story of Tevye and his family.   It’s a moot point as to whether, strictly speaking, Fiddler on the Roof, is a musical comedy.  (It clearly draws extensively on the musical-comedy form but so does West Side Story, which also draws on Shakespearean tragic drama and which few would consider musical comedy.)  What’s unarguable is that the musical comedy, as a form of American theatre that flourished throughout the mid-twentieth century, was created and sustained almost entirely by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, or by their children – Irving Berlin, the Gershwin brothers, Lorenz Hart and Jerome Kern (as well as Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim) all come into this category.  It’s fair to say that Cole Porter was the only major Gentile musical composer of the period.  The rhythms of the words and music in Fiddler on the Roof (Joseph Stein’s parents were also Polish Jews) express a link between Central-Eastern European roots and New World destinations.  Seeing the finale in this context, you can interpret the lack of songs not as a cessation but as an interruption – normal service to be resumed once the exiles reach Ellis Island.

The title character (Tutte Lemkow) appears at both ends of the story.   He never speaks or sings.  His precarious position reflects that of Anatevka’s Jews more generally:  Tevye explains at the start that ‘every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a simple, pleasant tune without breaking his neck’.  It’s ‘Tradition’ that enables them to keep their balance and which is in various ways destroyed.  The fiddler must finally come down from the roof to follow the rest of the community out of the village.  Acknowledging him, Tevye beckons to the fiddler to do just that:  there’ll be other roofs in other places.  John Williams won’t be best remembered for Fiddler on the Roof but his adaptation of the Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick song score won Williams his first Oscar, and he composed the violin cadenza performed on the soundtrack by Isaac Stern (born in Ukraine, brought to America by his parents as a baby).  To describe Jerry Bock’s melody for the fiddler as a simple, pleasant tune is much too modest.  It’s played by Stern with thrilling brio.

5 July 2026