FIDDLER ON THE ROOF
US, 1971, 179 minutes, Colour.
Topol, Norma Crane, Leonard Frey.
Directed by Norman Jewison.
Fiddler on the Roof is most people's idea of a wonderful musical -songs and dance, story, memorable characters and human feeling. Its stage success all over the world was amazing and many actors made great reputations in the role Tevye, the milkman, who sang Tradition and If I Were a Rich Man.
The main criticisms of the film are that it is not as good as the play and that it is too long. If these objections do not bother an audience, then they will enjoy it immensely because its beauty, its human interest, the deft-tongued milkman who is a Jew in alien Czarist Russia, and who is the common man, happy, yearning for more, traditional, arguing with God and loving his family, always evoke human response.
Topol brings warmth and humour into a role that he performed for years on stage in England. Leonard Frey (Harold in The Boys in the Band) plays his tailor son-in-law. Norman Jewison has directed films like The Russians are Coming, In the Heat of the Night, and The Thomas Crown Affair.
1. What was the significance of the symbol of a fiddler on the roof?
2. What role did the song "Tradition" play in the film - to set the tone, the religious and race background, the attitudes and conflicts of the main characters?
3. What kind of man was Tevye? Was he sympathetic? How kindly was he? How understanding? How did he fit into the traditions?
4. How was Tevye's relationship with God presented? Did you enjoy this comic yet personal intimacy? How did it enhance Tevye’s personality? How did "If I Were a Rich Man" contribute to this?
5. Comment on the picture of Jewish peasant life in Czarist Russia - the closed community, the relationships with gentiles, the friendships, the simplicity, the work, the matchmaker. the rabbi.
6. Did you like Tevye's wife? Why? Did you like his daughters?
7. Did you think the film presented a good case for true love as against arranged marriages? Why did the older people cling to traditions?
8. How were the threat to peace. the hostility to Jews and the shadow of persecution ever present in the film? How did the beauty of the marriage, "Sunrise, Sunset", contrast with the soldiers' attack on the Jews?
9. Why was Tevye opposed to his daughter's marriage to the revolutionary?
10. Why was Tevye so hard on his daughter marrying a gentile?
Did he have any real basis for his opposition? How strong
were his religious beliefs - did they provide adequate grounds?
11. Why was the destruction of the village and the forcing of the Jews to emigrate so saddening? were you moved? Why?
12. How did the music, songs, dancing, colour and the personalities combine to make the story effective? How did the Jewish isolation and persecution theme humanise the story?
