A new doc about the making of the 1971 classic asks, Are movies about art or politically correct ‘representation’?
Hollywood filmmaker Norman Jewison made the Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night and Moonstruck but is less known for his best films, the musicals Fiddler on the Roof and Jesus Christ Superstar, which showed different aspects of the Canadian-born director’s talent. That’s the initial approach of the new behind-the-scenes documentary Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen. As the doc develops, its subject becomes intimate and parochial.
The fact that Fiddler on the Roof, a rare, straightforward example of Hollywood Jewish folklore, was directed by a non-Jew is a wonderfully instructive irony. This doc looks into Hollywood’s multicultural liberalism before the industry became obsessed with virtue-signaling and limited its enterprise — from art to self-intoxicated “conversation” about diversity and representation.
A movie as great as Fiddler on the Roof would be impossible given today’s cultural diktats that restrict artists according to their ethnic and gender identity, the new segregation. The makers of Fiddler’s Journey don’t go against the politically correct shibboleths but work around them. When Fiddler opened in 1971, Jewison’s background was identified as Methodist, but here, he makes a curious admission: “As long as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Jew. ‘Jewison — son of a Jew.’”
At first this sounds like desperate self-justification — such as actress Rebecca Hall’s suddenly discovering her family’s black ancestry just in time to promote her race-movie directorial debut, Passing. But in Fiddler’s Journey, director Daniel Raim, screenwriter Michael Sragow, and producers Matthew and Natalie Bernstein uncover more amusing ironies: When Jewison cautioned the Jewish executive producers at United Artists, “What would you say if I told you I’m a goy?” Walter Mirish and Arthur Krim responded, “What does that matter? We don’t want a Second Avenue production.” (The inspired casting of Topol as Tevye rather than Zero Mostel avoided the risk of comic vaudeville.)
And so the world got a first-rate big-screen adaptation of the Broadway hit show that also proved to be a fine, consciously non-stereotypical version of the Sholem Aleichem story “Tevye’s Daughters,” in which a milkman and his family face challenges to Jewish tradition. Jewison describes the Seventies Hollywood rationale: “We all have a family, and we all wind up sitting around a table. They [the public] can understand Tevye and his problems with life and his relationship with God.” This is similar to Martin Ritt’s relating the story of his Jewish immigrant family to achieve the empathy and imagination he brought to the story of a Depression-era black sharecropping family in 1972’s Sounder.
The imaginative capacity that produces films such as Fiddler on the Roof and Sounder was nurtured by cultural beliefs that are at the heart of Fiddler on the Roof itself. The ethnic endeavor of Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Jerome Robbins’s stage production deliberately addressed a larger audience. The human story being everyone’s story, Jewison enlisted multiethnic talents to transfer the project’s essence — an idea of survival inspired by a Marc Chagall 1923 painting, Green Violinist.
Watching the film’s production designer, Robert Boyle, discuss “human values” in the design of shtetl life and seeing music arranger John Williams write a cadenza for Isaac Stern to perform during the film’s credits, you realize that most contemporary Hollywood filmmakers have lost the human touch — even Spielberg’s West Side Story, which is primarily in touch with political fashion. A recent New York Times article on PC cinema asked, “Should Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner be the ones to update West Side Story, a musical conceived by four Jewish men but fundamentally about Puerto Rican lives?” But Fiddler on the Roof already definitively resolved the debate on “representation.”
The beauty of Jewison’s film derived from such disparate sources such as Boyle’s applying the secular aspiration he had insinuated into the scenery of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest; filming in Zagreb that utilized the army of movie-loving Tito; even the casting of WASP actress Michele Marsh from Oh, Calcutta! as Tevye’s daughter Hodel. Jewison shot Marsh’s farewell song, “Far from the Home I Love,” as a diaphanous vision of family nostalgia, with overlapping images that touched more deeply and realistically than any other movie musical ever did.
Raim and Sragow let Harry Belafonte intone “Jewison’s a man who is fiercely committed to social justice.” But Jewison in retrospect confesses, “In a way I found myself in making the film.”
Jewison’s experience in Fifties and Sixties musical-variety TV programs climaxed in 1962 with The Judy Garland Show, which prepared him for his unexpectedly fluent Seventies films: Fiddler, an extension of the Broadway convention; Superstar, a foray into that period’s brief rock-music/ecumenical experimentation.
In both films, Jewison’s widescreen visions owe nothing to the usual practice of flat, proscenium composition. Jewison’s eye-thrilling imagery and kinetic energy is distinguished from work by his television-trained colleagues Sydney Pollack, John Frankenheimer, Franklin J. Shaffner, and Robert Mulligan. Those two musical projects revealed something hidden but innate to Jewison’s spiritual and creative quest. John Williams modestly explains Jewison’s approach: “Knowing how to shoot music, how to shoot dance, came from his musicality.”
I had emphasized Jewsion’s cinematic skills in a 2012 Metropolitan Museum of Art presentation. Look back on his cross-cultural Fiddler as a giant leap beyond today’s representation wars.
