University of Virginia Library

CINEMA

Musical Harbingers Of A Cultural Revolution

By BARRY LEVINE

Seeing Norman Jewison's
film of 'Fiddler On The Roof
almost makes me wish I were
more Jewish than I am.
Adapting plays to the screen is
a tricky business, but this
"Fiddler" manages to add
something to the translation.

Adaptation is, in fact, what
the story is all about. In a small
village of pre-revolutionary
Russia, the dairyman Tevye
(played with exuberance and
solemnity by Topol) finds that
raising his family of five
daughters in the old ways
requires conciliation with the
new. When Yente the
Matchmaker (Molly Picon)
prepares a marriage between
his oldest daughter Tzeitel
(Rosalind Harris) and a much
older but wealthy butcher,
Lazar Wolf (Paul Mann), Tevye
finalizes the agreement but
discovers that his daughter has
other ideas. She wants to
marry a poor but promising
tailor, Motel (Leonard Frey),
and Tevye, impressed by both
their audacity and their
sincerity, eventually gives his
permission.

The second oldest, Hodel
(Michele Marsh), falls in love
with a radical student from
Kiev, Perchik (Michael Glaser)
who asks for Tevye's blessing
and not his permission. With
choices like those, Tevye grants
his blessing and his permission.
The third oldest, Chara (Neva
Small) marries a non–Jew, a
peasant named Fyedka
(Raymond Lovelock), and
although Tevye disowns her
existence, he eventually gives
her his blessing.

The binding thread for
Tevye and the older
community is tradition, the
network of continuity that
allows for a semblance of
order. At its best moments, the
film evokes a sense of tradition
in ways that the assertion of
the song by that name couldn't
do: a rapid chorus of images of
ritual items at the beginning of
the film; the Sabbath
preparations and blessings of
Tevye's wife Golde (Norma
Crane) that visually expand
into a community of private
observances; the old Rabbi
giving the opinions of religious
wisdom which are all the more
esteemed because of their
commonsense.

In this respect, the film also
utilizes the potential of wide
screen color photography.
Director of photography
Oswald Morris integrated earth
colors of brown, gray, greenish

blue and white into a rich but
genuine pattern, and the added
dimensions of the wide screen
and occasional use of
deep-focus photography help
to embrace the setting of
peasant life in Russia. Jewison
expands on this by his
elaborate but not ostentatious
use of dissolves, moving
through images and scene with
the fluidity of a memory.

The most unique
choreography is not in the
dancing, adapted from the
Jerome Robbins stage version,
or the photographic
movements, but in the
expressive qualities of the
performers. Molly Picon's
Yente, for instance, has an
exuberance that all but leaves
her exasperated. Paul Mann's
character of the wealthy
butcher preens his full beard
whenever he's pleased with
himself; a man in the village
gives himself a Well put!
whenever he likes his own
wisdom. Such characters do
variations on Jewish routine
(which Molly Picon, for one,
has been doing for years) but
with an infectious
self-satisfaction that separates
the humorous from the derisive
in ethnic comedy.

Topol as Tevye is
particularly expressive. When
he talks and sings about
tradition, he points his
forefingers in a terse demand
for obedience, but almost
immediately opens his palm in
a gesture of accommodation. He
alternately pleads and berates
his God in asides that ask only
for a little more or a little less
attention, depending on the
circumstances. We often
directly enter his thoughts, by
a distancing from others
though freeze frames or
dropping others into the
background while he
ruminates, or in entering a
"dream" that he constructs to
explain his first daughter's
choice of husband to his wife.

The weakest points in the
film are, I think, when it moves
away from its expressiveness
and closer to historical realism.

At any rate, unlike so many
Broadway-plays-turned-movies,
"Fiddler" encompasses more
than just nostalgia: it generates
a glorious vitality that few
films attain.