Flashback: Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
Some notes on the DVD commentary recorded by the film's star, Topol, who passed away this week at the age of 87.
Chaim Topol—known professionally simply as Topol—passed away this week at the age of 87.
He is best known for playing Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, both on stage and on film, but he played other roles too, including the Greek smuggler Columbo in For Your Eyes Only—the first James Bond movie I ever saw—and the biblical patriarch Abraham in The Genesis Project’s word-for-word adaptation of the book of Genesis.
Fiddler on the Roof happens to be my favorite musical of all time, and I’m happy to say I caught one of Topol’s 3,500+ stage performances when it came to Vancouver a few decades ago—so I figured I’d dig up and re-post some comments about the film’s 30th-anniversary DVD edition that I sent to the now-defunct OnFilm discussion list on March 14, 2002.
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I finished watching my Fiddler on the Roof DVD with the commentary track a couple nights ago, and boy, do I love that movie. The commentary is provided by director Norman Jewison and Topol, the guy who played Tevye, and I found it interesting enough, even if there were some stretches without commentary. (I mean, hey, the film is three hours long.)
Some of their anecdotes are amusing, like how Jewison chose Tevye's horse because, in Jewison’s opinion, it had a big nose like Topol’s; they picked the horse from a group of horses that were on their way to the glue factory, and they grew so attached to it (Topol talks about the “rapport” he had with the horse) that Jewison made sure the horse was provided for after filming was completed, so it died a natural death some three or four years after the film was finished. And although it sounds like they recorded their comments separately, they also both use the word “sexy” to describe the scene where Tevye and Golde have their ‘Do You Love Me?’ duet—the way Tevye whispers the question at first, the “tender” way they sit on the bed together at the end of the song, the way that, as Topol puts it, married couples still have to “court” one another even after they’ve been together a few decades. (Of course, as the song points out, Tevye and Golde didn’t even meet each other until their wedding day, so they never had a chance to “court” before they were married!)
Some of their other anecdotes are more serious. The film was shot in Yugoslavia, and both Jewison and Topol say they worked with Serbs and Croats and never once got any hint of any animosity between them. Given that the film ends with people of one ethnic group being expelled from the village where they have lived for generations, it adds an interesting, sad subtext to the film, knowing that the places where the film was shot would be divided by “ethnic cleansing” some 20 years later. Topol, who was only 35 when they made the film, and who has starred in countless stage versions of this musical before and since, also talks about how his own daughter joined the cast of a 1995 production in London, playing Chava, the girl who marries a Gentile and is cut off from the family; he describes how especially heartbreaking it was, for him, the first time they rehearsed the scene where Tevye explodes in his daughter’s face and disowns her, because he had never raised his voice like that to her, and this was the first time he had ever played that scene while looking in the face of a woman he had actually raised, himself, from when she was a baby.
I love the way the musical tries to soften that 1960s-era tension between traditional ways of doing things and new, more radical ways of doing things. Perchik, the Communist, is dismissed by many people as a radical, but when he introduces Hodel, the second daughter, to the kind of dances they do in the big city, the dance has a quaint, old-fashioned air about it; and as Tevye himself admits, “Weren’t our old ways once new too?” Watching the film now, I find I am also more sensitive to the way in which other forms of modernity creep into the community, yet no one seems to mind; I refer, of course, to Motel’s sewing machine (“From now on, no hand-made clothes! Everything will be made by machine!”). I find Motel a very interesting character, because he’s such a faithful Jewish boy, yet it is he who first confronts Tevye with the news that “the world is changing” and then demands his right to ask for Tzeitel’s hand in marriage because “even a poor tailor is entitled to some happiness”; what makes this even more interesting is that Tevye likes this hint of rebellion, and observes that Motel is finally beginning to sound like a man.
Watching the film, I couldn’t decide which of the three younger couples I identified with most. Motel and Tzeitel are very true to their faith, except on one or two points—namely, whether they can choose who they ought to marry—and I can identify with that, being a firstborn, and therefore predisposed to traditional ways of doing things, myself. But a part of me also likes Perchik’s restless, questioning, s--t-disturbing ways, which I can also identify with; then again, he is more secular, and the only time he makes any sort of explicit reference to his faith, or to the faith of his people, is when he uses the story of Jacob and Laban to underscore his socialist politics (“you can never trust an employer”). And as for Fyedka and Chava—well, as a kid, I always wanted to marry a Jewish girl, and the fact that these two strike up a romance over their mutual love of books is definitely appealing, too. But I can also sympathize with Tevye’s concerns about interfaith marriage, which, on one level, are actually quite practical, and not necessarily just the symptom of “religious intolerance”, as Jewison puts it (to quote Tevye, “A bird may love a fish, but where would they build a home together?”).
Lately I find I’ve been crying at the strangest moments during films, and the scene that really grabbed me while watching Fiddler this time came during the wedding celebration, when Perchik removes the rope separating men from women and encourages everyone to dance together. Actually, it wasn’t at that exact point, but a little bit later, when Tevye or someone (I forget who) takes the rabbi by the hand and takes him into the dance, and then, while the rabbi is looking off to the side, the man dancing with him switches places with one of Tevye’s daughters. When the rabbi looks back and realizes he’s holding hands with a woman, he pulls his hand away … and then he takes out a handkerchief that both of them can hold while dancing. That was when I shed a tear, when I saw the rabbi accommodating this new idea, but only to a point; the handkerchief is at once a symbol of compromise and acceptance, but it is also a symbol of the tradition he’s trying to hold onto with some sort of integrity. That’s something I find I’m constantly wrestling with, and the fear of rejection by my community often hangs over my head somewhere, so I guess the scene got to me because the rabbi—the one person above all others who embodies what the community stands for—was at once accepting and inclusive, which made me glad, yet he still felt the need to erect some sort of barrier, which indicates the tensions are not entirely resolved, which made me sad. So I cried out of joy, but out of sadness, too.
I could say a lot more about this film, but that’s enough for now. I will, however, add that the current DVD (it is at least the second version that has been released) is a fantastic bargain—it’s as inexpensive as most other MGM/UA discs, and it not only has a commentary track, but it also comes with a 50-minute 1971 National Film Board of Canada documentary about the making of Fiddler (Jewison himself is a Canadian), as well as a few of the original Sholom Aleichem stories on which the musical was based, plus a deleted song and a few other goodies. It’s a keeper.
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Incidentally, you can watch that documentary on the National Film Board’s website now.