Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof

by Alisa Solomon

  The pogrom that interrupts Tzeitel and Motel’s wedding celebration was the obvious opportunity for displaying baseless belligerence. Jewison tightened the tension by bringing the intruders in quietly, brandishing torches. Tevye, in a close-up, is the first to notice and he signals the musicians to stop playing. Quickly the guests stop dancing. Anticipation builds as the two groups stare silently at each other for several seconds, the camera cutting back and forth, first in medium shots that take in the groups, then in tighter ones that linger on faces and on the itchy hands of pogromists clutching their clubs. Silence. A horse neighs, one of the marauders shouts, and what was only hinted at onstage erupts in full fury in the film. Someone snatches the white cloth off a long table; crockery and candlesticks fly. Tables are overturned; bottles crash and splinter. Perchik throws himself at two men who are slashing the goose-down pillows Tevye and Golde just gave to the newlyweds, and he’s clobbered. Only when Tevye runs after him does the constable shout, “That’s enough.” It is perhaps the most chilling moment in the scene, the longtime neighbor standing idly by when he could have prevented the violence. The camera follows the mob outside as they torch shops, break windows, and yank the innards from featherbeds.

  The sequence seems symbolically to flash forward to the Nazi destruction, evoking the coming slaughter much more explicitly than the play: Jewison closes in on images of burning books and smashed windows, tropes that had become familiar in the years between the Broadway show and the movie, a period in which “the Holocaust” emerged as a distinct entity. Though not so thoroughly ignored in the postwar years as a recurring assertion long held, the Holocaust did become more widely recognized and represented; it was now the subject of an emerging academic discipline. In pop culture terms, the change is starkly denoted by two major movies that referred to the Holocaust between the stage and screen Fiddlers: Sidney Lumet’s somber, searing portrait of a traumatized survivor (Rod Steiger) in The Pawnbroker (released in 1965) and Mel Brooks’s outrageous satire, The Producers (1968, starring Zero Mostel), in which Hitler is hilariously mocked. Jewison needed only to make a few clear gestures to invoke the devastation awaiting those who don’t leave the continent.

  The expulsion, when it comes, an hour after the pogrom, draws this association even more directly. Jewison drags out the departure into twenty gloomy minutes as the community sings “Anatevka,” packs up, trudges away, and, in an image inspired by Vishniac, rides huddled on a barge across the river as the sound track reprises the Anatevka dirge.

  Within this sequence, the synagogue again plays the central role as the emblem of rupture as Jewison gives the rabbi more than a minute of near-silent action vacating the shul. With no sound other than creaking planks as he ascends the steps to the ark, he takes out a Torah scroll and hands it to his son, who drapes it with the red velvet table cover and exits. Alone, the rabbi picks up the other Torah scroll and cradles it like a baby against his shoulder; with his free hand, he takes a small stack of books by the string that is binding them: This is his luggage. He turns toward the door, pauses. As he looks around for the last time, the camera slowly pans the walls: it inches across the mazoles, the Hebrew, the pale painted animals, moving one way, then the other. The camera takes in the whole space in an overhead long-shot, now revealing it as shorn of all decoration, save the wall paintings, those suppliers of beauty and comfort that cannot but stay where they are. As the rabbi shuffles away, muttering a melody to himself, one senses that this could very well be the last time anyone gazes upon them with understanding.

  Jewison couldn’t stand that idea, no more in real life than in the fictive frame of the movie. Just as he rescued Tevye’s horse, Shmuel, from the glue factory after the shoot—he sent monthly payments to a local farmer to care for the animal until it died of natural causes—he wanted to save the beautiful shul. As “the only wooden period replica now existing in Europe,” he reasoned, “it seems somehow wrong that it should be destroyed.” Before January 1971, while still working on the film, Jewison was already sending inquiries to scholars in Israel who had helped him with research, offering to donate the structure to the country and make a personal contribution to the dismantling and rebuilding costs of some $30,000. His query made it to the ear of the mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek. “Seriously, I think Jerusalem has enough sites that are original including Synagogues and does not have to import recently made copies here,” he huffed. But the minister of religion was reported to be “quite fascinated by the idea.” It took a year for the minister to come up with a plan: in March 1972, he suggested placing the structure on the expanding campus of Bar Ilan, the religiously oriented university near Tel Aviv, where he thought it could serve nicely as a study house, a space for learning Talmud and other sacred texts. There was just the matter of raising all the funds for the move. Jewison and Mirisch went to work soliciting donations in the United States while the interested Israelis sought contributions at home.

  By the time the funds were assembled in December 1972—and one can imagine Tevye delivering the news—the new old shul had been torn down. What Jewison had come to consider “a symbol of that old shtetl life” was gone.

  * * *

  When it came time to release the movie, “that old shtetl life” didn’t get much of a hearing, either. The marketing and publicity team at United Artists, in their London and American offices, didn’t expect to sell seats by highlighting shul, shabbos, and prayer shawls. The show’s fame presented them with both a boon and a challenge. How could they bank on its status as beloved icon, whose movie version every fan would want to see, while also expanding its reach? Hollywood’s marketing machinery—a huge apparatus compared to Broadway’s—went into high gear, with an advertising budget of more than $3.3 million (the initial allocation of $1.4 million had grown once Jewison complained). Jewison stayed unusually involved in the rollout plans. “We must not merchandise a Winston Diamond the same as we would a gold filled bracelet from Maceys [sic],” he instructed Mirisch.

  A special sales director targeted Jewish audiences and, a full four months before the movie’s premiere, “logged the largest group sales advance in motion picture history”—$1.25 million—as Variety reported in July 1971, with tickets going fastest in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Baltimore, and Detroit. Advance sales were going so well in New York that the advertising director didn’t think it was necessary to spend any money on an ad buy there for months. But beyond what Jewison called the movie’s “strong initial ethnic pull” lay the question that had troubled Fiddler’s authors seven years earlier and that, surprisingly, still worried the movie’s marketers: What about the others?

  The publicity director in London had an answer: “It is essential that we establish the universality of the film,” he insisted, “and avoid stressing its Jewishness.” To that end, he proposed submitting Fiddler as “the 1971 UNICEF film” and “tying in all of its national premieres to charitable events for the worldwide children’s organization.” Or, he offered, they should develop “a campaign aspect which involves making comparisons between our village and oppressed villages in changing times in other countries. There are Anatevkas everywhere.” Neither suggestion was pursued. But the anxiety behind them drove much of the marketing. Press materials sent out to journalists and group sales directors repeated, again and again, Joe Stein’s story about the Tokyo producer wondering how Americans could relate to a show that was “so Japanese.” Jewison repeated the anecdote in interview after interview.

  The promotion team targeted one non-Jewish market that turned out to be especially receptive to the celebration of “tradition” at a time when the rising counterculture was threatening its authority: America’s mainstream white churches. The Lutherans published a study guide on Fiddler (as they had done through their “Dialogue Thrust in Film” program for movies like Up the Down Staircase, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Jewison’s own In the Heat of the Night). The guide appeared in the February 1971 is
sues of Lutheran Teacher and Resource magazines, bringing the film to the attention of more than 100,000 educators in the Lutheran Church of America and the American Lutheran Church. In May, the Missouri Synod also printed the guide in its magazine, which meant, Jewison noted, that “90 percent of Lutheranism in the U.S. will have some direct contact with Fiddler on the Roof through official church publications (over 10 million people and over 1,500 congregations).” The church trumpeted the effort, sending a news release to more than sixteen hundred newspapers and trade papers. In addition to recounting Stein’s Japan story, the Lutherans urged clergy to tell parishioners to see the movie and offered a series of questions for discussion: the purpose and function of tradition; tradition and change; tradition and personal responsibility; tradition, love, and marriage; tradition, parents, and children; attitudes and prejudice in relation to tradition, Tevye, and God.

  America’s Catholic church, representing nearly a quarter of the country’s population, banged the film’s drum, too, after special screenings for Terence Cardinal Cooke, the Archbishop of New York (“he loved it,” a United Artists representative reported to Jewison) and priests and nuns around the United States. About a year into its new program for Catholic-Jewish dialogue, instigated by the Second Vatican’s pronouncement only a few years earlier that Jews were not collectively guilty for the death of Christ, the church seemed especially eager to show its sensitivity to Jewish culture. The movie itself became a tool of the church’s new ecumenism.

  A review in the Catholic Film Newsletter of November 30, 1971, praised how, “if anything, the film’s emphasis is more unabashedly Jewish than that of the stage version,” and was quick to add, “Far from limiting this Fiddler’s possible audience, however, the very richness of the film’s texture that captures so beautifully a whole range of Jewish culture—the custom of family Sabbath prayers, the religious rites and symbols of the synagogue, the ancient Jewish dances and wedding festivities, the respect for family, even the humorous tradition of the marriage broker—only serves to enhance the film’s charm and appeal.” Of course there was nothing “ancient” about Jerry Robbins’s choreography, nor a prevailing convention of comic matchmakers, but the show’s gathering aura of authenticity wafted over these representations—and the film, with its realism and reach, fixed them indelibly in the popular imagination as age-old markers of Jewish culture.

  In a dutifully latitudinarian reading, the Catholic Film Newsletter asserted that the movie’s “real universality springs from its boundless faith in the providence of God and the resounding hymn it sings to hope and life and the spirit of man. And the story of Tevye’s three oldest daughters, each of whom marries one remove farther outside the expectations of the family’s cultural heritage, catches the conflict between change and tradition with a humor and also a poignancy that is as delicate as it is applicable to the cultural crisis of today.” (The anonymous writer did not, however, care for Molly Picon’s performance, which “smacks a bit too much of the New York Jewish spinster type.”)

  Audiences came, in droves. Upon opening, Fiddler led national movie box-office sales, bringing in nearly six million dollars between November 8 and 14, 1971—one of the highest first-week takes of the year—and it held the number one spot for a healthy five weeks. The figures were all the more impressive in the wake of peevish reviews in the national press.

  They irked Jewison. He found Vincent Canby’s complaints in the New York Times—that the movie “let most of the life out” by setting the action in a real village with real houses, barns, and animals—“condescending and way off track.” Jewison suspected that the movie would be “hurt the most” by dismissals from Newsweek (“[Topol’s] sense of comedy, matched with Jewison’s own cement touch, crushes the fun out of every good line”) and Time (“Gone with barely a trace are warmth, joy, insight, and even the most elementary kind of entertainment”). But United Artists people assured him that the critics hardly mattered. They had no impact on word of mouth in New York, where sales soared, nor as the film opened around the globe—playing to 93 percent capacity crowds in Paris and to 115 percent in Japan.

  * * *

  When Canby piled on with a Sunday article, comparing the movie unfavorably to Robbins’s staging, and accusing Jewison’s realism of “overwhelm[ing] not only Aleichem, but the best things about the stage production,” Jewison figured that Canby was trying to justify himself in response to Pauline Kael’s defense of the film. In her typically quirky and querulous New Yorker review, she handed over a socko, marquee-worthy quote: Fiddler is “the most powerful movie musical ever made” (never mind that this follows the disclaimers that “it is not especially sensitive, it is far from delicate, and it isn’t even particularly imaginative”). But it is a peculiar review, as bold as it is infelicitous in its discussion of Jews. In Kael’s judgment, the movie succeeds by virtue of not being too Jewish: Topol’s “brute vitality” helped to “clear away the sticky folk stuff”; the Gentile director was able to avoid “slip[ping] into chummy Jewish sentimentality.” Rather than offering Tevye’s story as “a public certificate of past suffering” and pandering, like most Jewish comedy, to “the mixed-up masochism of Jewish audiences,” the film offered “vitality, sweetness and gaiety.” Much to Kael’s relief, “the movie is not a celebration of Jewishness; is a celebration of the sensual pleasures of staying alive.”

  Jewison didn’t seem to see Kael’s queasiness about Jews in these remarks, which on their own might have offended him. After all, from his standpoint, it was his thorough commitment to Jewish spirit and specificity—exemplified in the assiduous construction of the shul—that should have given the film its particularity and allure. But Kael’s general enthusiasm for this “absolutely smashing movie,” appreciated on its own terms—she admits to never having seen the Broadway show—seemed to offer a vindication. Jewison resented Canby’s use of the stage production as a bludgeon for battering the movie. “Since when did film ever have anything to do with the theatre?” he fumed. He wanted the Times to commission a rebuttal by an “important writer,” but United Artists’ press team had a better plan: they piped letters to the editor over the names of non-showbiz friends who did appreciate the movie, excoriating Canby for his “elitist” prejudices and failure to understand the differences between a film and a play. Meanwhile, as “part of our campaign to strike back at the negative critics,” the PR office encouraged admiring critics like Frances Taylor of the Long Island Press (with “considerable syndication”) to take Canby’s arguments on directly: “One critic complains that ‘Fiddler’ on the stage moves him but the movie doesn’t. He can’t explain why.”

  Jewison and the United Artists team reckoned that Canby and other disdainful critics would be shown up when the Academy Awards rolled around. The picture was nominated in eight categories—including best picture and best leading actors—and they expected to win big. To that end, they mounted a vigorous campaign—far from unusual even then, but taken on with fervor. United Artists spent $75,000, “a lot of money,” Walter Mirisch allowed, “but we all agreed that we should make a great effort to win as many of the awards as we possibly can.” To lead off they published two-page ads filled with gushing quotes from critics. They assembled a set of quotes to send to all the Academy members and hosted special screenings.

  Jewison arrived at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles on April 10 for the 44th Academy Awards trying to keep some room in his imagination for the possibility of disappointment. He ardently wanted Fiddler to win and believed it deserved to. Becoming the top-grossing movie of the year had its concrete satisfactions, but beyond any ego-driven craving, Jewison wanted his profession to acknowledge the momentousness of the movie. A best-picture win would be a win for Fiddler’s values. As the evening wore on, that mental space for dejection had to widen. Delighted as he was about the awards snagged by John Williams for score adaptation, Oswald Morris for cinematography, and David Hildyard and Gordon McCallum for sound mixing, the more high-p
rofile prizes for art direction (Robert Boyle) and acting (Topol, Leonard Frey), eluded them. Jewison watched impassively as William Friedkin claimed the best director statue for The French Connection and was stunned to hear that same title called out at the evening’s climactic end. “It was a tough night” for him, but Jewison consoled himself: “I knew in my heart that Fiddler would become a classic and remain on the screens of the world and in people’s minds long after The French Connection had faded away.”

  * * *

  The cop thriller hasn’t exactly disappeared, but Jewison knew he was making a safe prediction about Fiddler. Promotional materials for the film noted that the show had played onstage for thirty-five million people in thirty-two countries before the picture opened and, as movies can, Jewison’s Fiddler rapidly multiplied those numbers exponentially.

  If the critics were right that the movie was heavier than the play—and Jewison himself admitted that he had tamped down the humor—its temper befit the topic and the times. Sure, the film delivered the pleasures of lavish, colorful numbers featuring beloved songs, but without the frivolity and fakery of the failing movie musicals that had so quickly fallen out of fashion. Its grandness and gravity seemed proper for portraying the Jews of the Pale and for the American moment as it reassuringly responded to the “cultural crisis” that alarmed the writers at the Catholic newsletter.

  Terms like “generation gap,” “counterculture,” and “sexism,” which had not been part of general parlance when the play debuted, had become the stuff of headlines by the time Topol bellowed “Tradition” on the screen seven stormy years later. And Fiddler’s on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand disposition gave viewers on either side of these issues a foothold for identification. The film sided with young women defying the demands of the patriarch, but only within the parameters of marriage. It depicted the rift in outlook between parents and children, but showed it from the mystified father’s point of view. It waved the countercultural banner against wealth and dog-eat-dog individualism, but by harking back to a bucolic past. (The shtetl “resembles a kind of hippie commune that you find in upstate New York or California,” the actor Leonard Frey, the movie’s Motel, told a journalist visiting the shoot in Yugoslavia, “with people totally needing each other, depending on each other.”) All in all, it imparted a reassuring sense that the current chaos had been weathered before.