Flashback: Notes on a few films by Norman Jewison (1926-2024)
A few things I've written over the years about In the Heat of the Night, Fiddler on the Roof, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Rollerball.
In other catch-up news: Norman Jewison passed away last Saturday at the age of 97.
There is a lot that could be said about his career, and it certainly has been said by far more knowledgeable writers than I. But I did want to acknowledge his passing, by linking to a few things I’ve written about his films in the past.
In order of their release dates:
In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Jewison never won an Oscar for Best Director, but this was probably the closest he ever got. In the Heat of the Night won more Academy Awards than any other film the year it was nominated, including Best Picture, but Jewison himself lost the directing trophy to The Graduate’s Mike Nichols.
No matter: this is a classic exploration of American race relations in the late 1960s, all filtered through the accessible trappings of a police procedural. And it was arguably the best of the three films Sidney Poitier starred in during the best year of his career (the others were To Sir, with Love and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?).
I wrote about this film while doing my Sidney Poitier marathon in April 2020:
— There has been much talk about the fact that In the Heat of the Night was a film about a black protagonist made by a white director (in the bonus features, John Singleton says Norman Jewison is “three for three” as far as he’s concerned, the other successful black-protagonist films being 1984’s A Soldier’s Story and 1999’s The Hurricane). I find myself thinking that it was also a movie about American racism in the deep south made by a Canadian. Which, in turn, gets me thinking about how 1961’s A Raisin in the Sun was also directed by a Canadian. . . .
Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
My favorite musical of all time.
I wrote some notes about this film after listening to the DVD commentary by Jewison and his lead actor, Topol, back in 2002—and I re-posted those notes to this Substack when Topol died last year:
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. . . .
Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)
After finishing one musical, Jewison directed another—and the two movies are not at all alike, which shows how well Jewison could adapt to the needs of his source material.
If the Broadway-based Fiddler was naturalistic to the point of being almost a documentary about life in the shtetl, the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar wears its artificiality on its sleeve, putting modern clothes, props, and military hardware into the basically ancient setting of its biblical story.
The film also begins and ends with images of the actors coming to the set and leaving once the movie is done—and Jewison uses this framing device to hint at larger mysteries, too. (Why does the actor who played Jesus not get on the bus with the others at the end? Has he transcended the production somehow?)
I have never really reviewed this film, per se, but it has come up often in things I’ve written, like this article about Jesus movies for Books & Culture in 2000 …
But if Jesus became a target of social unrest, he was also increasingly portrayed as a political activist in his own right. Norman Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) is particularly interesting in this regard, as it plays both of these angles at the same time. The film, a rock-and-roll musical composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, invited the youth of the Woodstock generation to see in Jesus an enemy of the establishment not unlike themselves. But it also takes aim at the belief that Jesus was more than “just a man”; Jesus, in this film, becomes a celebrity who gets swept away by his own fame. The film uses the Jesus story to critique celebrity culture, and vice versa.
… or this essay on the depiction of sexuality in Jesus films, which appeared in the 2005 book Scandalizing Jesus? Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ Fifty Years On …
The first mainstream film to suggest an erotic link between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, however sublimated, was Norman Jewison’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar (1973). As in DeMille’s film, Judas is once again a political revolutionary. But this time, instead of keeping a lover on the side, he objects to the way Jesus allows himself to be distracted by Mary’s attentions as she anoints his feet and head. In this as in so many other things, the Jesus of this film is so passive it is difficult to say whether he actually feels anything sexual for Mary or is simply letting her do what she does. For her part, in a song called “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” Mary observes that although she has had “so many men before in very many ways,” she does not know what to make of her feelings for Jesus. Does she feel a purer kind of sexual attraction? Or is she on the verge of giving up sexuality for some sort of spirituality? Such ambiguities extend even to Jesus’ relationship with Judas, who repeats a key line from Mary’s song shortly before committing suicide. Indeed, some critics have inferred that there may be something more than political zeal behind Judas’s frustrations. Lloyd Baugh notes that Jesus and Judas exchange “intense looks” and are sometimes framed with Mary in a way that suggests “a rather tense menage a trois.”
… or this article on the original musical and its various adaptations, which I wrote for Christianity Today in 2018:
Regardless, the musical’s cultural influence continued to spread. By the time the film version of Jesus Christ Superstar came out in 1973, it was actually the third hippie-flavored Jesus musical to hit movie theaters that year, following Johnny Cash’s explicitly evangelical The Gospel Road and the film version of Stephen Schwartz’s parable-heavy Godspell. But in some ways, it was still the most divisive of the bunch. Forbes, writing again in Christianity Today, called the Superstar movie a “theological disaster” but an “ecumenical triumph” because it had united Jews and Christians of all stripes in condemning the film. But again, not all Christians rejected the film out-of-hand. James M. Wall, writing in The Christian Century, called the film “compelling, moving and visually stunning” and concluded that it is “a work of cinematic art which just might strengthen the viewer’s faith in its original story.” . . .
Interestingly, the NBC broadcast [2018’s Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert] joins recent films like Risen, The Shack, and Killing Jesus in casting a non-white actor as Jesus. In the Jesus Christ Superstar film, Jesus was white and blonde, while Judas was played by a black singer. The character’s frustrations with Jesus and his increasingly spiritual mission seemed to echo the black community’s impatience with white Christianity and its lack of engagement with justice issues. In the NBC broadcast, both Jesus and Judas will be played by people of color, which suggests this version of the musical may resonate in a different way. . . .
I also mentioned this film—and, specifically, the ending of this film—in the blog posts ‘Hail, Caesar! and other movies about making Bible movies’ (February 2016) and ‘Ben-Hur Superstar: two films that end on the same note’ (June 2016).
Rollerball (1975)
Finally, I happened to see Rollerball for the first time last year, partly because Quentin Tarantino was about to discuss it in his Video Archives podcast.
I wrote a few notes about this film on my private Facebook page right after watching it, and while I don’t feel like re-posting the entire thing, I can post a few excerpts here (especially the Jewison-relevant ones, but I also like the bits that comment on the more prescient aspects of the film’s depiction of the future):
— Before The Hunger Games... before The Running Man... but not before Star Trek’s ‘Bread and Circuses’ episode... there was this movie about televised fights to the death. And it is so, so 1970s that the gladiatorial combat here takes the form of roller-skating. (Televised death also comes up in 1976’s Network, I believe, but not in a sports context as I recall.)
— This was the first film Norman Jewison directed after his back-to-back musicals, 1971’s Fiddler on the Roof and 1973’s Jesus Christ Superstar. It’s... definitely different from those films (which were already very different from each other, despite both being musicals). Kinda weird to think that the guy who made this bit of futuristic dystopianism also made 1967’s In the Heat of the Night, a gritty Oscar-winning cop movie about racism (and abortion)... but there’s a political sensibility to this film that certainly fits with that film. . . .
— Caan goes to the library and discovers that the books he’s looking for have been digitized and edited; the only way he can read them is on a computer at one of the main library branches, and it’s doubtful the information he’s looking for would still be in them. Kind of a prescient glimpse of the world we live in now, where people often “buy” books digitally on the assumption that they’ll have access to those books forever, and then the corporations that “sold” those books either delete them from people’s Kindles or make stealth-edits to them (like we recently saw with the works of Roald Dahl). Keep your hard copies and physical media, people! . . .
— In one scene, Houseman sits in front of a bank of TV screens for a teleconference with some other executives, and each person appears on his or her own TV screen. Merriam-Webster says the word “teleconferencing” was coined in 1963—a dozen years before this movie came out—but I’m guessing it was used for telephone conferences back then. If each of these people had to sit in front of a dozen (or two dozen) TV screens every time they had a meeting, that would be very inefficient. Still, it’s interesting to see the equivalent of a Zoom call in a futuristic movie made in 1975. (Wikipedia says the movie is set in 2018, but if that detail is spelled out on-screen, I missed it.)
And that about covers it, as far as Jewison films I’ve written about are concerned.
I do want to underscore one thing, though: Jewison was not just a great filmmaker, he was also a proud Canadian; among other things, he founded the Canadian Film Centre to support up-and-coming Canadian filmmakers back in the 1980s.
And speaking as a Canadian who happens to be a big fan of Fiddler on the Roof, I must note that the National Film Board of Canada produced a 49-minute documentary on Jewison while he was shooting Fiddler called Norman Jewison, Film Maker (1971).
I don’t know if NFB videos are viewable outside of Canada, but if they are, you can stream that documentary here. (It has also been included as a bonus feature on some DVD editions of Fiddler, which is how I first learned about it.) Enjoy.