Tradition!

Stanley Kauffmann over at the other NR (New Republic) called it “Mogen David Superstar” and recoiled in horror. Well, Mr. Kauffmann, one of our best film critics, can’t always be right, and he’s dead wrong about Fiddler on the Roof, certainly the most beautiful, moving, powerful, big movie musical of the last few years. Starring the Israeli actor Topol in the role Zero Mostel made his own on the stage, Fiddler is an enormous, endless hulk, oversized in scale perhaps, but filled to brimming with warmth, simple truths, love.

The love is for tradition, for family, and for the volk—the Jewish whatever. Living uneasily in the Russian shtetl, the Jews were constantly in danger of a pogrom or, when it suited the purposes of czarist internal politics, of expulsion. Without tradition, Tevye the milkman sings at the outset of the film, the lives of his people would be as precarious as—as a fiddler on the roof. On comes the sweet sound of Isaac Stern and the wonderful, Chagallesque vision of the fiddler perched atop a roof, silhouetted against the morning sky. And then the story of Tevye, his wife Golde, and their three marriageable daughters and the matches they make, each against their parents’ wishes. The eldest, Tzeitel (Rosalind Harris, who looks like a young Barbra Streisand with looks), rejecting the village’s old, rich butcher (Paul Mann) chooses instead Motel, a tailor as poor as her father. The shy, bespectacled young man, remarkably acted by Leonard Frey of The Boys in the Band, finally asserts his manhood by standing up to Tevye and claiming his bride. Their marriage, solemnized under the traditional canopy, followed by a modest feast and a brilliant wedding dance by four top-hatted young men balancing bottles on their heads, is interrupted by the czar’s soldiers, destroying the evening’s joy as a foretaste of the expulsion to come.

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David Brudnoy

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Stanley Kauffmann over at the other NR (New Republic) called it “Mogen David Superstar” and recoiled in horror. Well, Mr. Kauffmann, one of our best film critics, can’t always be right, and he’s dead wrong about Fiddler on the Roof, certainly the most beautiful, moving, powerful, big movie musical of the last few years. Starring the Israeli actor Topol in the role Zero Mostel made his own on the stage, Fiddler is an enormous, endless hulk, oversized in scale perhaps, but filled to brimming with warmth, simple truths, love.

The love is for tradition, for family, and for the volk—the Jewish whatever. Living uneasily in the Russian shtetl, the Jews were constantly in danger of a pogrom or, when it suited the purposes of czarist internal politics, of expulsion. Without tradition, Tevye the milkman sings at the outset of the film, the lives of his people would be as precarious as—as a fiddler on the roof. On comes the sweet sound of Isaac Stern and the wonderful, Chagallesque vision of the fiddler perched atop a roof, silhouetted against the morning sky. And then the story of Tevye, his wife Golde, and their three marriageable daughters and the matches they make, each against their parents’ wishes. The eldest, Tzeitel (Rosalind Harris, who looks like a young Barbra Streisand with looks), rejecting the village’s old, rich butcher (Paul Mann) chooses instead Motel, a tailor as poor as her father. The shy, bespectacled young man, remarkably acted by Leonard Frey of The Boys in the Band, finally asserts his manhood by standing up to Tevye and claiming his bride. Their marriage, solemnized under the traditional canopy, followed by a modest feast and a brilliant wedding dance by four top-hatted young men balancing bottles on their heads, is interrupted by the czar’s soldiers, destroying the evening’s joy as a foretaste of the expulsion to come.