Fiddler on the Reel: Tevye Goes Hollywood

As the holiday season approaches, it’s high time to pay tribute to one of December’s favorite films. No, I‘m not talking about It’s a Wonderful Life or Elf or Home Alone. This post is devoted to a movie that’s been a star of many a holiday singalong: the 1971 screen adaptation of the musical theatre classic, Fiddler on the Roof.  

The whole history of this long-running Broadway hit is captured in a fascinating book by Alisa Solomon, first published in 2013.  It’s titled Miracle of Miracles: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof. Solomon begins with author Sholem-Aleichem and his creation of a lovable Old Country dairyman named Tevye, burdened with three marriageable and strong-willed daughters. Her book’s first section, and its driest, explains early attempts to put the Tevye stories on the American stage. Section Two bursts to life with an insider picture of exactly how the Broadway  hit came to be. Solomon has interviewed the still-surviving members of the Fiddler team and mined the archives to get a full picture of the joys and kvetches associated with the mounting of a Broadway blockbuster that at one time seemed the most desperate of gambles.

In section three, Solomon visits productions of Fiddler in places as far-flung as Israel, Poland, and Brownsville, Brooklyn, where ethnic divisions almost derail a heartfelt junior high production in which most of the young actors are Latino or African-American. But one chapter, “Anatevka in Technicolor,” is devoted to  the big-budget film. What’s striking is how, though the material remains the same, the aesthetics in play and film are so different. Under Jerome Robbins’ brilliant direction and choreography, the stage version avoided kitschy Borscht Belt stylistics to capture the flavor of a fragile community rent asunder both by outside enemies and by inner stresses. But there’s a fanciful folk spirit to the staging, enhanced by Zero Mostel’s larger-than-life portrayal of the leading character. Audiences around the globe quickly came to love the show’s universal qualities, to the point that book author Joseph Stein was asked, at the Tokyo opening of Fiddler, how the team had managed to understand so well the essence of Japanese family dynamics.

When Norman Jewison was invited to direct the film version, he was best known for the Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night, which for its day was bold in addressing racial discrimination in a small Southern town. Jewison favors what might be called poetic realism on screen. He wanted to show audiences an Eastern European Jewish shtetl that was more real than charming. And he wanted at all costs to avoid turning his characters into outsized caricatures. That’s why he chose as his Tevye a sturdily handsome Israeli, Topol, who was younger and more macho than the various stage Tevyes had been. Filming in what was then Yugoslavia, Jewison captured the look of the fields and forests, the ramshackle homes, and especially the tiny synagogue, modeled after the few still-standing “shuls” that survived in the countryside of eastern Europe. The portrayal of Teyve as an attractive and appealing “mensch,” notes Solomon, made for a nice antidote to the on-screen portrayal of Jewish neurotics of the Woody Allen ilk who dominated the movies of that era.

Still, for all its Jewish authenticity, the film too has inspired those from many cultures to tell their own stories. One Bollywood director dreams of transplanting the basic story to strife-torn Kashmir . And Lin-Manuel Miranda admits that In the Heights, his pre-Hamilton musical about a changing New York Latino community, borrows from his admiration for Fiddler. Who knew?

Jerome Robbins: Leaping from Stage to Screen with West Side Story

We mostly think of Jerome Robbins as a stage creature. There are all those ballets he choreographed for George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet. He supplied the dance numbers for such Broadway gems as On the Town and The King and I, then both directed and choreographed everything from Peter Pan to Gypsy to Fiddler on the Roof.

But he loved movies too. With the help of Amanda Vaill’s marvelously insightful Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, I want to focus here on the transition from stage to screen of perhaps his most famous production, West Side Story.

Jerry Robbins was part of the West Side Story team from the very beginning. In fact, the original idea came from him. While studying at the Actors Studio,  he advised young Montgomery Clift on how to make the part of Romeo relevant to the modern world. The trick, he felt, was to think about the tight-knit ethnic enclaves of New York City: “What would you do if you were an Irish Catholic kid and fell in love with a Jewish girl? . . . And what if you were in a gang, and her people were too, and there was fighting?”

By the time Jerry and colleagues Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim were ready to transform this concept into a Broadway musical, the ethnicities of the central characters had changed. At first, potential backers simply weren’t interested. But West Side Story, both directed and choreographed by Robbins, proved to be a stage triumph. And a movie sale quickly followed.

Hollywood was not entirely receptive to Robbins’ talents. He didn’t lack for screen experience, having staged the dance sequences for the film version of The King and I, including the remarkable “Small House of Uncle Thomas.” But the studio honchos who were producing the cinematic West Side Story were determined to hire a veteran Hollywood director. They found one in Robert Wise, who’d helmed successful action films and (years before) edited the great Citizen Kane. Robbins himself was grudgingly hired as co-director, responsible for the musical sequences while Wise concentrated on the book scenes.

 Jerry immediately began experimenting with ways to synthesize music, camerawork, and dramatic action, but his extensive notes on every aspect of the project rankled the powers-that-be. As he wrote to a friend back home, “It’s a hard time out here now, and rather than my teaching them how to make the camera dance it’s possible that I’m being taught the limitations of imagination and lack of daring.”

Despite Jerry’s original preference for black-&-white film noir stylistics, the studio bosses insisted on Technicolor and recognizable stars. Natalie Wood was no problem for Jerry: the two got along famously. (Neither had much use for the actor cast opposite her, Richard Beymer.) And Robbins was at his happiest filming a brilliantly danced Prologue on the streets of New York, in a slum area that would soon be cleared to build Lincoln Center. Afterwards, though, while in the midst of staging the Dance at the Gym, he suddenly found himself dismissed. His firing was blamed on the film being over budget, though this was hardly a convincing excuse.

Ultimately, West Side Story collected ten Oscars, with Wise and Robbins sharing the directorial prize (and ignoring one another in their acceptance speeches). Robbins received a special award for choreography as well. Later the film’s screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, paid tribute: “Jerry Robbins is the man behind the gun. He put the bullets in, he cocked it, he shot it—and everybody else is just smoke and noise.”