‘Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen’ 
Directed by Daniel Raim, 2022

Have you ever seen the original Japanese poster for “Fiddler on the Roof”? If you look closely, you can catch a fleeting glimpse in Daniel Raim’s excellent new documentary, “Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen.” When the 1971 film was first released in Japan, the local distributor marketed it with a colorful image of a tall, handsome man with blond hair holding aloft a dark-haired girl. He’s wearing an old-school Russian army uniform, while she’s dressed like a peasant. Without the movie logo, you probably wouldn’t know it was supposed to be a scene from “Fiddler”: it looks more like a remake of “Gone with the Wind” from the flower-power era.

If you know the story, you might still find it remarkable that the Japanese distributor thought that this part of the script — the romance involving the third daughter, Chava, and a gentile soldier named Fyedka — was the most saleable aspect of the entire enterprise. No Teyva, no Golde, no bottle dance, no fiddler, no roof. 

The Japanese poster would be even more remarkable if you had been old enough and Jewish enough to remember the 1939 Yiddish-language, non-musical movie of the same stories. It was titled “Tevya” and was written and directed by a then-famous Yiddish actor, Maurice Schwartz, who also played the title role. 

Frankly, this is a dreadful film, overly melodramatic and humorless; it too concentrates on the third daughter, but in an entirely different way. Chava is portrayed as a flighty, airheaded “maidela” who is stupid enough to succumb to the advances of a devious Cossack, and thereupon brings shame and dishonor to her poor, suffering family. It’s the same story, the same daughter: Yet in one telling, it makes for a great romantic image, while in the other it is a “shondah” and a disgrace.

All of which gives credence to a statement by the lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who conceived and created “Fiddler on the Roof” in conjunction with composer Jerry Bock and librettist Joe Stein. In the first few minutes of Mr. Raim’s new film, Mr. Harnick tells us that “Fiddler” was “the best version of the Sholem Aleichem stories that we could possibly come up with.” Indeed it is.

The last few years have been a boon to “Fiddler” fans. Not only were there two excellent productions in New York: an insufficiently appreciated revival with Danny Burstein (2015), who came closest to embodying Tevya as he is depicted in the original stories; and Joel Gray’s celebrated Yiddish version. Also, there was Alisa Solomon’s excellent book, “Wonder of Wonders -— A Cultural History of ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’” published in time for the 50th anniversary of the show in 2014. It was followed by a first-rate documentary, Max Lewkowicz’s “Fiddler: A Miracle Of Miracles” (2019), which, like Ms. Solomon’s book, is about the entire phenomenon, from the author Sholem Aleichem himself up to the 2019 Off Broadway production. The new film, “Fiddler’s Journey,” is  streaming 50 years after the movie was being released internationally.

Mr. Raim’s film is foremost a portrait of director Norman Jewison, and how his prior career, of directing music on television (most effectively in Harry Belafonte’s great 1959 special) as well as both light comedy and pictures with social justice issues on screen, made him the perfect filmmaker to produce and direct the 1971 feature. There are also telling interviews with the movie version of Tevya, Chaim Topol, and with the three who portrayed the daughters, Rosalind Harris (Tzeitel), Michele Marsh (Hodel), and Neva Small (Chava). Surprisingly, they barely mention Norma Crane (Golde), who died at 44 right after the movie was finished, or Paul Michael Glaser (Perchik), who soon became a huge TV star and 1970s icon. The other essential interview is with musical director John Williams, already creating spectacular movie scores a few years before George Lucas and Steven Spielberg would make him a household name.

Mr. Jewison makes a convincing case for his artistic decision to situate the “Fiddler” film in the actual world — to make it as “real” as possible, not theatrical. Thus, Sholem Aleichem’s Anatevka, a fictitious village in what is now Ukraine, was recreated in Croatia, which was, in 1971, part of Yugoslavia.  

Keeping it real meant also rethinking the use of dancing; the original production, directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, featured dancing in almost every scene. Mr. Jewison restricted the big dance numbers to the diegetic scenes, where dancing is actually part of the story, as in the wedding sequence at the end of Act 1. 

For numbers like the opening, “Tradition,” Mr. Jewison came to the same conclusion as Soviet filmmakers who, regarding song-and-dance as somehow bourgeois, let the camera and the editor do most of the footwork. In “Tradition,” for instance, there’s a famous rapid-fire montage of religious images from Anatevka that are intercut precisely on the beat.

It was in pursuit of greater realism that Mr. Jewison made the decision not to cast Zero Mostel, who created the role of Tevya and played no small part in making the show the most successful ever up to the mid-1970s. Mr. Jewison wanted the Tel Aviv-born Mr. Topol because he seemed less Broadway and more international. Mr. Topol also knew how to play the role less larger-than-life; in his interview, he talks about how he took one of the funniest lines — “As the good book says, ‘Each shall seek his own kind.’ In other words a bird may love a fish but where would they build a home together?” — and deliberately underplayed the humor in order to bring out the more poignant drama.

There are other tidbits here. As most know, the title of the work was inspired by the Russian artist Marc Chagall, who did several paintings of violinists on shtetl roofs. But Mr. Jewison explains that these were, in turn, inspired by Chagall’s uncle, who would periodically get “shikker,” climb to the top of his house, and fiddle away. No one mentions, however, that one of the most famous of Sholem Aleichem’s non-Tevya stories was titled “The Fiddler.”

A movie and cultural critic, Kenneth Turan, points out the irony of how “Fiddler” was filmed in a country that now no longer exists, even while the story itself takes place in a country that wasn’t actually recognized as a country in 1971. Even today, as the documentary is being streamed, that country is fighting for its right to exist, and “Fiddler” seems more relevant than ever.

One last note about the reception of “Fiddler” in Japan. Yes, the show played Tokyo, in a Japanese translation and a production that was attended by the creators, Stein, Bock and Mr. Harnick. (There are several great clips on YouTube; you haven’t heard “Matchmaker” until you’ve heard it in Japanese.) Stein reported, and swore it was true until the day he died in 2010, that during the rehearsals, one of the Tokyo producers approached him and said, “We can’t understand how this story played in New York — it’s so intrinsically Japanese.”