Remembering Norman Jewison

When I was a graduate student at UCLA, leading introductory literature classes, I was surprised by the number of celebrities’ kids who showed up on my roster. One was the son of Charlton Heston, who brought in to show me his father’s prized first edition of Hemingway’s cryptic story collection, In Our Time. One was the pretty, wholesome daughter of handsome, wholesome singer Pat Boone. One was Kevin Jewison, a pleasant young man who turned out to be the son of film direction Norman Jewison, the Oscar-winning director who just passed away at the ripe old age of 97.

 Looking back at Jewison’s long career, I was struck by how varied it was. Jewison, one of those famously “nice” Canadians, was born and raised in Toronto, and entered the entertainment world via Canadian television. That led him to NBC, where he seems to have been typecast as the director of innocuous musical specials, like The Chevy Showroom Starring Andy Williams (1959) and Bulova Watch Time with Pat Boone (1961). He also had the opportunity to work with such notable talents as Danny Kaye, Harry Belafonte, and Judy Garland, before pivoting into film. Following some innocuous Doris Day romantic comedies, he found more of a challenge working with Steve McQueen in 1965’s The Cincinnati Kid, a tough-minded film about serious poker players and the women who love them. The next year, he released The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, a timely Cold War satire –about a Russian submarine running aground off the New England coast—that made a comic star out of Alan Arkin. It led to four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor: I found it absolutely delightful at the time, but less so when I re-watched it decades later.

 In 1968, Jewison was back at the Oscars with In the Heat of the Night, a tight and tidy drama about racial tension in a small Southern town following a murder. The fraught interplay of the town sheriff (played to a fare-thee-well by Rod Steiger) and a Black big-city cop (Sidney Poitier) was brilliantly acted under Jewison’s direction. At a time when interracial tension was very much on the public’s mind, the film was nominated for five Oscars. It won four, including Best Picture, Best Actor (the much-deserving Steiger), and Best Screenplay (a vast improvement over the clumsy novel on which it was based). But Jewison lost to Mike Nichols of The Graduate in the Best Director category.

 In 1972, Jewison (who had to patiently explain to reporters that despite the implications of his name he was NOT Jewish) produced and directed a creditably gritty screen version of the beloved stage hit musical, Fiddler on the Roof. He followed up with something completely different, the film translation of Jesus Christ Superstar. Then came the violent and futuristic Rollerball (which indirectly led –as I well remember—to Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000), and a series of powerful films about social injustice. But his last really huge hit, leading to another Best Picture Oscar and another Best Director nomination, was a charming romantic comedy, 1987’s Moonstruck. Though he was nominated three times for the Best Director Oscar, he was fated never to win that prize. But the Academy did grant him in 1999 the coveted Irving Thalberg Award, in honor of his role as one of Hollywood’s most creative producers, alongside such industry masters as Billy Wilder, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg.

 And son Kevin, my amiable former student, became a motion picture cameraman, whose credit I just noticed on Sleepless in Seattle.