Reviews

Fabulous photography, marvelous music that you'll remember for decades, choreography that you'll babble about to your friends, casting so perfect you'll never imagine anyone else in any role. Humor both gentle and witty, and uproarious through razor-edged perfect timing. And great heaving sighs and tears as the world presses relentlessly on the shoulders of Tevye the Milkman. Topol's performance is the great rock on which all this is built, as rich and full and complete a movie experience as it is possible to have. Compare the phony "terror" of The Sound of Music (the real von Trapps just took a train and didn't go back) with this story that still echos every time you hear the words "ethnic cleansing" from yet another part of the world. And on top of it all, the playing of the greatest violinist of our lifetime, Isaac Stern. Not to be missed? Not to be seen less than twice!

I'm cautious about films with a message: they are too easily heavy-handed and preachy, or on the other extreme capable of producing a mass "understanding" that is actually untrue ("The Klansman/Birth of a Nation" comes to mind). Films dealing with sexual attitudes can very glibly preach either "damnation for transgression" or "freedom from repression" with equal superficiality. This film is remarkable for painting all its characters with dimension: no one is evil, but everyone can be weak, afraid, and make poor decisions with good yet fearful intentions. The acting is terrific, so you feel satisfied at having seen a movie of quality at the same time you feel frustrated, infuriated, and finally exhausted by the outcome of the plot. Another example of Leonard Nimoy's excellent qualities as a director, forever lost - I'm afraid - in the strange perception that his work in Star Trek makes all of his career somehow lightweight.

This film burned basic cinematic images into my brain at the age of nine: what a Cyclops should look like, a Roc, a dragon, a fighting skeleton. Sure, as an adult my intellect knows that their movements in this movie are stiff, the blending with live actors not as sleek as later movies learned to do. All this is apparent on video, but it doesn't matter to me and it doesn't seem to matter to my 3-year-old. It's still what these monsters are "supposed to be." What I do know my daughter is missing is the tremendous impact the creatures had on a large movie screen. We had a whole audience of kids restlessly anticipating, and finally demanding, the ultimate climax with the crossbow that we knew had to come. On the small screen, only the skeleton seems able to be awesome; my kids still haven't seen the Cyclops 20 feet high.

All that said, I am disappointed in the obvious failings of the old Hollywood system showing through, although they can hardly be described as gone from movies today. All the thugs and minor bad guys look Semitic; the hero, heroine, and main villain no more belong in Bagdad than Roy Rogers and Dale Evans would. Sinbad may know how to fence, but he looks and acts like he's about to draw a pistol, not a sword. The princess starts off most speeches using standard Hollywood trying-to-sound-Arab stilted English, but then she will lapse suddenly into pure Midwestern Farm Girl as if she were speaking to Andy Hardy rather than a Sheik of Bagdad. This film was made in a time when Hollywood and its intended audience still took for granted that there were no nonwhite actors who could play leads, and acting like this is the now-embarrassing result.

This film is a classic of special effects, but it otherwise belongs safely in the Vault of Time.