Re-watching Fiddler

Last weekend, having an idle Saturday afternoon to kill, I noticed that ABC was showing Fiddler on the Roof.  I'm pretty sure it was the first time I had watched it since I had seen it in the cinema in 1971.

I remember my parents were a bit underwhelmed by it, as was I at the time.  I think the basic problem was that, after The Sound of Music, there was a particularly high expectation that big musicals should end happily, and ones that didn't felt a tad unsatisfactory.   And it certainly seems, looking back on it, that with the end of Rodgers & Hammerstein, the not-quite-so-uplifting musicals seemed to be quite in vogue in the 60's:  Camelot, Sweet Charity, that little seen Julie Andrews movie Star!, Paint Your Wagon (which I haven't seen, but my mother said it featured lots of mud); and even Oliver and Mary Poppins have a somewhat melancholy feel about their happy endings, if you ask me. 

Re-watching Fiddler, though, I did enjoy its music more than I remembered, and was reminded of its strong thematic relevance to the 1960's. The same challenges that Tevye, the father, faced in terms of his daughters not following his authority and that of "tradition" were certainly the same ones you could see sweeping the West, particularly (I think) in Catholic households.   Yet the Broadway musical was from 1964, pretty much at the dawn of the sexual revolution and all the angst about contraception, and de facto relationships, etc.   It seems in retrospect to be a pretty prescient work.      

There's a very interesting recent article about the show up at the Guardian, written because it is its  50th anniversary.  (Perhaps that why it showed up on TV too?)    I see that the movie version was a big commercial success, although I wonder whether it was to the same extent here,  since at that time I don't know that Australians had had all that much cultural exposure to Jewish humour and characters.

I do still think the story makes one regrettable choice which doesn't work as well as it should.   Why couldn't Tevye's final scene with his 3rd daughter, the one who rejected tradition in the most direct way by marrying a Christian, have been more emotional?   He is packing his cart, about to leave the village forever, and cannot bring himself to look directly at his daughter and her husband who have come to say goodbye.  Tevye finally mutters softly, "And God be with you", which is relayed on by his other daughter, who is upset at her father's behaviour.  

And that's it.  Now, Tevye's attitude may be realistic, but if he is going to be shown to still care for his daughter, wouldn't it work better if he could soften just a bit more and look at, or embrace, the child who he may never see again?  I think it sort of also sours a little the final appearance of the Fiddler metaphor, where Tevye invites "tradition" along with him as he heads his way to America.

Still, a very worthy movie musical.