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.
