Adapting big Broadway musicals to the "big screen" must not be easy. Some very popular Broadway musicals have been made into embarrassingly bad movies (Annie, Brigadoon, A Chorus Line, Finian's Rainbow, Flower Drum Song, Hello Dolly, A Little Night Music, Man of La Mancha, Paint Your Wagon, 1776, The Wiz) and more have been made into mediocre movies that have some good scenes, usually carried by songs and/or dances rising from the general tedium and miscastings (Bye Bye Birdie, Camelot, Evita, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Godspell, Guys and Dolls, Jesus Christ Superstar, Show Boat, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, South Pacific, West Side Story).

Apparently, many people love "Fiddler on the Roof." Seeing the movie for the first time a third of a century after its initial release, I am puzzled, because what I saw was a very long (three hours long), mostly dull movie with only one hit song ("Sunrise, Sunset"), surprisingly dull choreography (surprising in that it derived from Jerome Robbins), with a stereotyped and uncharismatic lead (Topol). I readily grant that the movie looks good, particularly the last half hour (the forced exodus). The cinematography of Oswald Morris (also responsible for photographing "Oliver!" and "The Wiz" and such grittier movies as "The Hill" and "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold") is impressive and the village (constructed near Zagreb, Croatia, which was then part of Yugoslavia) seems to have been designed by someone who spent a lot of time looking at Marc Chagall paintings. The instrumental music (mostly the fiddling of Isaac Stern) is good—and superior to the songs.

I guess that many people are charmed by the sitcom (based on gently comic stories of Sholom Aleichem of an imaginary Yiddish village, Anatevka in what is now the Ukraine but was then part of the Russian empire of Tsar Nicholas II), focusing on a deliveryman with five daughters. The three oldest ones begin by singing about their hopes that the matchmaker will make them a match, but each eventually makes her own match and the presses Tevye (Topol) to accept not only their choices of a husband but their exercise of choice in the matter, which breaches tradition (the song "Tradition" is the leitmotif of the musical). None of the daughters Rosalind Harris, Michele Marsh and Neva Small are the ones of marriageable age, their two younger sisters are all but faceless) made much impression on me. (I tried to imagine Bette Midler as the eldest; it was a part she played first!) The grooms were stalwart but types rather than characters (Leonard Frey was nominated for an Oscar playing Motel, the tailor and first husband). Although also cast in a stock part as the kvetching Jewish mother with a heart of gold, Norma Crane managed to breathe some life into Golde.

Bursting into song in the realistic medium of cinema is almost always jarring. Most of what I consider the best movie musicals (Cabaret, Band Wagon, Singing in the Rain, All That Jazz, Moulin Rouge, Chicago, 42nd Street, Funny Girl, The Sound of Music, Summer Stock, Gypsy, Busby Berkeley movies) center on putting on musicals or at least on characters aspiring to success on the stage (so does "A Chorus Line," so this is no guarantee!). Without any charismatic musical star or a string of great songs, it's hard to imagine a three-hour musical about social change, nostalgia, and ethnic cleansing could succeed, and I don't think that "Fiddler on the Roof" does.

Did I mention that the movie runs three hours? There is supposedly what may be unique: a "director's cut" that is shorter than the theatrical release, 32 minutes shorter, but the bloated version I saw on TCM is also what is on DVD. It seems that director Norman Jewison did not want to make a musical comedy. This is why he did not want to have Zero Mostel reprise his part as Tevye. (Mostel would have made a larger impression than Topol did, though not the kind Jewison wanted. If not Mostel, why not Alan Arkin, who had ignited Jewison's "The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming"?) Making a realistic movie about prejudice (something Jewison certainly did in "In the Heat of the Night" and "A Soldier's Story") is incompatible with trafficking in nostalgia about "the old country" and the coy charm of musical comedy romance about young love overcoming parental opposition.

The horror of a whole village being ordered to leave in three days is rendered bland by the recurrence of Topol shrugging and accepting what had been unthinkable. (And, BTW, what is the basis for the friendly relationship between him and the local tsarist official? Is it there just to make the delivery of the edict a personal affront?) The expulsion of a long-established Jewish community has been done better (recently in "The Pianist," even in the chilly "Garden of the Finzi-Continis"). It seems that the people of Anatevka are as bored with their lives as this viewer was and are hoping for a better movie once they get out of this one. The trek away from the village is very photogenic and at least the fleeing villagers do not sing as they trudge into urban exile (in Krakow, New York, and Chicago).




Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children up to Age 4