"Fiddler on the Roof" (1971)

                                                        

    

“Because of our traditions, we've kept our balance for many, many years…You may ask, ‘How did this tradition get started?’  I'll tell you!  [pause} I don't know.  But it's a tradition...”    Tevye the milkman, in the opening monologue

“Fiddler on the Roof” remains one of my favorite movies, and one of my all-time favorite musicals, for over fifty years. It mixes comedy, domestic drama, fantasy and earthy realism, pays tribute to a community in the approaching shadow of history, and features some of the greatest songs ever written.

As I watched “Fiddler on the Roof” on the eve of July 4^th, I thought about things that have changed or disappeared because of the pandemic.  Fireworks.  Barbecues.   Handshakes. Hugs. Get-togethers.  Baseball games and other seasonal sports. The Olympic games. Theater. Concerts. Proms. Graduations. School activities. Summer camps. The ways we recognize personal milestones and other special occasions. Working out at the gym. Shopping and strolling through a mall. Birthday parties. Weddings.  Church services and religious rituals. Dining out. Writing in a coffee shop. Awards ceremonies. 

Going to the movies.

These and other traditions, or habits or whatever we call them, give our lives order and balance, something to look forward to, something to reach for, to measure our achievements, or confirm our human connections. Another way to think about “traditions” is to consider them as rites of passage, rituals, celebrations, or affirmations.  They comfort us, make us feel like we belong to something.

As Covid-19 put a sudden halt to many activities that gave our lives balance and structure, few considered the importance of providing hope, and a strategy, for their eventual return.  Our lives as we knew them were stolen by a disease, and it felt as desperate and uncertain as if the seasons suddenly ended, or as if we were uprooted from our world with no promise of return.  

Which makes “Fiddler on the Roof”, the epic musical film about the slow erosion of a village’s traditions, that much easier to relate to now. 

“Fiddler on the Roof” tells the story of the fictional Anatevka, a small, rural Russian Jewish village in the days before the Russian Revolution.  Anatevka’s inhabitants are colorful, devout, flawed and fun-loving.  We observe their routines, their conflicts and celebrations, their rituals and their love of music and dance.  They are comic archetypes as well as human beings who we love immediately.

Like the fiddler of the title, they are doing the best they can to “scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking their necks.”  Their lives would be shaky without their traditions.

Our guide and companion is Tevye, a poor milkman with an intimidating wife, Golda, and five daughters. Tevye is a genial, bearded bear of a man, who breaks the fourth wall in the opening scene, welcoming us to his village in the opening number, “Tradition”.

As the film goes on, we become Tevye’s privileged confidants, eavesdropping on his droll conversations with God, as he tries to make sense of the changes around him that he can barely follow, let alone come to accept.

Three of Tevye’s daughters are of marrying age.  Traditionally, a matchmaker would find a mate for the girls. Tevye, as head of the household would give his permission.  Then the wedding would take place under a canopy, according to the long-held rituals of the faith. The pattern repeats through the generations.  

“Fiddler on the Roof” chronicles the breakdown of these conventions, with a terrific cinematic treatment of the daughters’ stories, and how each one strays further from tradition to make a life for herself.

“Fiddler on the Roof” embraces tradition, but is also ambivalent about it.  The scenes leading up to eldest daughter Tzeitel’s marriage to Motel, the Tailor, are joyous and boisterous, as Tevye accommodates small cracks in their traditions, sometimes in elaborate and hilarious ways.  A true highlight is how he convinces his superstitious wife that Tzeitel must not marry the butcher, Lazar Wolf, as was arranged by the Matchmaker.

But as the next two daughters find love, and test the traditions to the breaking point, the film takes a foreboding turn and becomes less carefree, and more serious.

Hodel, the second eldest, and Perchik, her dissident lover, persuade Tevye to accept their love, even as she must leave home to join Perchik in a Siberian prison village.   

Chava, the third child, commits the unforgivable sin of running off to marry a Christian boy, Fyedka, who connects with her over their shared love of books. This is too much for Tevye, who feels that in order to accept them, he would have to abandon everything he ever believed in.

Chava’s story is troubling to me.  As a gay man, who feared the same kind of ostracism from my family that Chava experiences, I felt her fear and emptiness.  On the other hand (to borrow one of Tevye’s favorite expressions), if someone I loved ran off with a person whose political ideas, let’s say, were contrary and even dangerous to my existence, I would understand Tevye’s bitterness. (Even so, I find his rejection of his daughter a little bit jarring, even though we see his pain, and he does  give Chava a tiny, indirect blessing later). 

As we have been discovering, over the months of closures and enforced distancing, it is tough to live without our rites of passage and rituals. We need most of them.  They enrich our lives, affirm our beliefs, and keep us connected through the generations.

Some traditions, though, belong to a troubled past, and become obsolete, like certain symbols and language, or the rejection of those who test our long-held points of view. Some traditions are so steeped in fundamental beliefs that they seem impossible to change. It is a dilemma that “Fiddler” demonstrates gently, through music and the foibles of being human.

By the film’s third and final hour, anti-Semitism and the encroaching Russian Revolution put an end to Anatevka and separate the community forever.  We discover the fate of some of the characters, and their destinations are symbolic of the future of the Jewish community: Jerusalem for the Matchmaker; Chicago for the butcher; New York for Tevye and his family, and Tzeitel and Motel the tailor; Siberia for Hodel and her political dissident; Chicago for the butcher; and Krakow for the Chava.

The sun itself is an important motif, rising and falling in gorgeously photographed sequences in the early sections, and then fading away into the dreariness and cold of winter as the film moves to its conclusion.  

After the breakdown of their rituals and traditions, and the end of Anatevka, Tevye still brings his “fiddler” along with him.  That fiddler represents Tevye’s hope.  By bringing the best of their traditions to America, they might build a new community through them.

I still have hope that after the temporary ceasing of our rituals and traditions brought on by the pandemic, that we will return to those things that gave our lives balance.

I especially hope to go back to movie theaters again.  I was fortunate to see “Fiddler on the Roof” in the traditional way when it was first released: on a big screen.

My parents took us to the Golf Mill Theater one chilly December afternoon in 1972.  We sat in the balcony, where it felt like the screen was right in my lap, almost close enough to reach out and touch it.

I remember watching the sun set to the horizon during the opening credits, when the fiddler performs his beautiful solo, dubbed by Isaak Stern.

The songs from the original “Fiddler” on Broadway were already very familiar to me from hearing them on radio and television.  They took on special meaning as I watched the movie at age fifteen, and as I got older, the meaning grows deeper.

I understand the joy of “Tradition”, and the tenderness of “Sunrise, Sunset”, the poignancy of “Do You Love Me?”.  Director Norman Jewison sensitively captured each number through perfect closeups and dissolves. The rich shades of lighting, and soft imagery, gave the film a perfect look. (Oscar-winning Cinematographer Oswald Morris purportedly used a silk stocking as a filter over his lens.)

“If I Were a Rich Man” was almost overplayed at the time.  Here, as Tevye performs it in a barn with his beloved animals around him, eating or ignoring him, the number took on a new freshness, so that I really heard the lyrics in a new way.

The film’s musical orchestrations provide commentary and foreshadowing.  The score is cleverly adapted, and won John Williams (of “Star Wars” fame) his first Oscar.

As a budding young filmmaker who spent hours cutting  Super-8 movies on my primitive editing bench, I was thrilled by Jewison’s rhythmic editing of the opening number, and his distortions of perspective as Tevye considered the future of each of his daughters. I was inspired, in my own attempts at filmmaking, to use closeups of interesting faces expressing deep emotion, and to pay attention to details like the dusty barns, foggy bridges, desolate train stations and celebrating crowds, that made “Fiddler” a rich experience, not simply a musical comedy on film.

I was absorbed in the sounds and the swirl of the wedding scene,  and especially the bottle dance. Not only was this something I had never seen, but for some reason I felt like I was moving through space as I watched it.  I noticed the way the camera was placed near floor level, and how it moved sideways to follow the action. Few sequences in movies have excited me as much as this.

The highlight for me was the dream sequence in the cemetery, that filled me with giddy chills and made me laugh as though I were on a carnival ride.  The desaturated color made it spooky, the operatic voices gave it sweep, and the ghostly figure of Fruma Sara, flying through the air like a silent-movie ghoul, as she gave her warning about Tzeitel’s marriage, made this scene the most memorable for me.

Topol, and Israeli actor, will always be Tevye to me.  His booming voice, easy laughter, and amusing physicality made Tevye a bigger-than life figure to me, so that his lack of reason near the end nearly broke my heart.  No one could have more completely embodied this character, and his closeups, especially of his eyes, are priceless.

“Fiddler on the Roof” inspired me creatively.  It took me through the full spectrum of emotions. It gave me tunes and images to remember and appreciate for a lifetime. Seeing it in a theater was an important moment for me as a young film enthusiast in my most impressionable years. 

How I long to have that kind of experience again in a theater!