Norman Jewison: a staggering array of work from Hollywood’s master craftsman

For five extraordinary decades, Norman Jewison’s film-making was the beating heart of Hollywood drama: he could do anything and supercharged it with idealism, confidence and style. Jewison has been behind an extraordinary array of classics and hits: for half the time the cinema has been in existence, Norman Jewison was the gold standard of a night at the movies.

The 60s saw his fizzy Doris Day comedies, the sexy Steve McQueen thriller-capers The Cincinnati Kid and The Thomas Crown Affair, the mould-breaking In the Heat of the Night, with Sidney Poitier as the black cop in the US south. Then in the 70s we had his epic Broadway adaptation Fiddler on the Roof with Topol’s iconic performance as the dairyman Tevye in pre-revolutionary Ukraine, stoically and humorously facing disobedience from his daughters and a pogrom from antisemites. Jewison followed it with the Lloyd Webber musical Jesus Christ Superstar, and then – in the same decade! – the acid satire of the futurist dystopia Rollerball, the union-buster drama F.I.S.T. with Sylvester Stallone and the legal thriller And Justice for All with Al Pacino yelling: “You’re out of order! The whole trial’s out of order!” The 80s returned Jewison to the issue of racism in A Soldier’s Story with Howard E Rollins as the African American officer sent to investigate a murder on an army base, and Agnes of God was another potent mystery thriller.

James Caan in Rollerball. Photograph: Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

Jewison rounded off the decade with one of the most famous romantic comedies ever made – Moonstruck – and in the 90s carried on with magnificent chutzpah giving us a satire of greed-is-good Wall Street, Other People’s Money, switched to another romantic comedy with Only You starring Marisa Tomei and Robert Downey Jr, before reverting to a powerful, muscular, issue-led picture with The Hurricane, starring Denzel Washington as the wrongly imprisoned boxer Rubin “ Hurricane” Carter and then in the new century directing Michael Caine in The Statement, about the shadowy, fugitive Vichy collaborationist Paul Touvier, wanted for war crimes.

The array of work is staggering, and Jewison’s masterly direction helped craft so much of postwar Hollywood cinema. Before the 60s were swinging, he gave us Doris Day and Rock Hudson in the style that was later to become chic in Mad Men, then he invented the stylish presence of Steve McQueen, the gambler, the adventurer and larceny-artist, carrying out his daring escapes in a funky split-screen arena of zeitgeisty cool. And at the end of the decade, Jewison took on the subject of racism and directed the slap heard around the world in In the Heat of the Night, with Sidney Poitier as the black homicide detective roped in to assist Rod Steiger’s bigoted white cop – and slaps back at the racist who slaps him. It is a brilliant mainstream issue movie of the sort that perhaps seems staid to some, but it is a masterclass in character-driven drama and action.

Lovable … Topol in Fiddler on the Roof. Photograph: Cine Text/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Fiddler on the Roof is probably my favourite Jewison film – it is amazing how joyfully it taps into Broadway energy, how it centres so strongly and confidently on Topol’s grandstandingly lovable performance (in fact, at 36 years old, he wasn’t all that much older than Paul Michael Glaser, later to find fame as TV cop Starsky, playing Topol’s Bolshevik radical son-in-law Perchik). Isaac Stern’s violin playing on the soundtrack as the “Fiddler” gives the movie such gusto and Jewison endows it with what David Lean had with Doctor Zhivago: storytelling energy and sweep. The gigantic success of Fiddler on the Roof got Jewison his directing job with Jesus Christ Superstar – a rock’n’roll audience pleaser which in the era before VHS home entertainment, sold millions of soundtrack LPs. Again, like Fiddler on the Roof, it wasn’t exactly fashionable in that heady era of the American new wave. But Jewison could turn his hand to fashionable and unfashionable alike; he could find in any movie project its pulses and its energies.

My second favourite Jewison film is the glorious romance Moonstruck, his Italian-American schmaltzer in which people ecstatically succumb to amore when the moon hits their eye like a big pizza pie. It sounds sugary on paper, and maybe it is, but it is effortlessly charming and entertaining and unexpectedly sensual.

Krakatoa-level of chemistry … Cher and Nicolas Cage in Moonstruck (1987). Photograph: Mgm/Allstar

Jewison made a star of Cher, or at any rate brought out the wonderful stardom latent within her (she got an Oscar – Jewison was nominated but didn’t win). He also nurtured one of the most deeply loved of Nicolas Cage’s OTT performances, playing a smoulderingly discontented bakery assistant with whom Cher’s shy widow falls in love, having already accepted a solemn marriage proposal from Cage’s boring elder brother, who then has to go to Sicily to be at the deathbed of his dying mother. Worrying about the “chemistry” of leading players has become a critical truism these days, but under Jewison’s shrewd direction, Cher and Cage had a Krakatoa-level of chemistry. It meant judging the exact amount of rueful comedy to go with the passion, but it also meant letting rip with the passion when that was the point. Romantic comedies very rarely have anything sexy about them, but when Cage angrily turns over Cher’s kitchen table and then they go to bed, Jewison brings the sizzle.

Maybe Norman Jewison himself was the fiddler on the roof of American cinema for 50 years, calling the tune, setting the rhythm, laying down the mood, but self-effacingly letting the main actors down on the ground get the attention and the glory. But what a virtuoso.