Norman Jewison, a filmmaker concerned with social issues, has died at the age of 97
The Canadian-born Mr. Jewison has slid in and out of genres during his four-decade career behind the camera, directing actors including Steve McQueen, Rod Steiger, Chaim Topol, Denzel Washington and Olympia Dukakis in musicals, romantic comedies and crime dramas. Which often examined social issues.
He was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Director, for the racing film and police drama In the Heat of the Night (1967), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture; “Fiddler on the Roof” (1971), adapted from the Broadway musical about the Jewish milkman Tevye by Sholem Alichim; And “Monstruck” (1987), a romantic comedy About the Italian-American Brooklynites that grossed $80 million at the box office.
Mr. Jewison became what the film critic David Thompson described as “a fly among directors,” making films as diverse as the Cold War satire “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming” (1966) and the heist thriller “The Thomas Crown Affair.” (1968) and the post-Vietnam War drama On the Country (1989). He also produced several of his own films, receiving four Academy Award nominations for Best Picture over three different decades.
Mr. Jewison, bespectacled and wearing an ubiquitous baseball cap, ran live television specials before coming to Hollywood in the early 1960s and learning from such old masters as William Wyler and Alfred Hitchcock.
He experienced the director-driven New Hollywood of the 1970s, when editor and director Hal Ashby advised that “the studio is the enemy of the artist.” He lamented the “monotony” of films and TV series in the 1980s; He worked long enough to see the emergence of cable television networks and streaming services, which provided a new outlet for the thematically rich films he preferred to produce.
Frustrated by the action-packed screenplays that often came to his desk, he often turned to playwrights for material—as with A Soldier’s Story (1984), adapted from Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a military lawyer black. Howard Rollins Jr. investigates the murder of a black warrant officer on a segregated military base during World War II.
He later made stage adaptations of Agnes of God (1985), about a psychiatrist (Jane Fonda) investigating the death of a newborn in a convent, and Other People’s Money (1991), about a tactless corporate raider (Danny De Vito). .
Almost all of his films dealt with issues of race, class, and injustice, if sometimes obliquely. “I don’t make social statements in my pictures,” he told the New York Times in 1978, “although I feel that a film should be about something, and have a reason for being.” He should not be ashamed of social media. problems.”
“Rollerball” (1975), featuring James Caan as the star of a corporate-sponsored hyper-violent sport, was inspired by his fears of a world ruled by iron-fisted conglomerates. “The Fist” (1978), starring Sylvester Stallone as a union leader modeled on Jimmy Hoffa, was drawn from his sense that “the working man doesn’t have as much to say about his fate as he should.” Justice for All (1979), in which Al Pacino played the idealistic lawyer, was a black comedy about corruption within the legal system.
Few of his films have been as successful as Moonstruck, in which Cher plays a widowed bookkeeper who falls in love with her. His fiancée’s brother (Nicolas Cage). Written by playwright John Patrick Shanley, who won a screenplay Oscar, the film was a humorous celebration of Italian-American families, and won acting Oscars for Cher and Dukakis, who played her mother.
“He really loves actors,” Shanley told The Times in 2011, “so what you see in his pictures is a kind of celebration of performance, as opposed to actors like painting, which illustrates the director’s vision.”
Mr. Jewison has never won a competitive Academy Award, but he received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Honorary Award in 1999 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America in 2010.
He is perhaps best known among critics for In the Heat of the Night, a civil rights-era landmark that premiered in the wake of race riots during the long, hot summer of 1967.
The film stars Poitier as Virgil Tibbs, a black homicide detective from Philadelphia who is recruited to help the local white police chief (Steger) solve a murder in a small Mississippi town. A scene in which Poitier is slapped by a racist white landowner, then responds with a slap of his own, leaves viewers gasping and cheering in a different way.
Mr Jewison explained in The Guardian that the scene was not improvised, as it was said: “I kept telling Poitier that Tibbs was a sophisticated detective, and he wasn’t used to being under pressure. I showed him how to do a slap. I said: ‘Don’t hit him in the ear.’ You really hit him on the greasy side of the cheek.” I told him to practice on me. A black man had never slapped a white man in an American movie. We broke that taboo.”
The Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote that Mr. Jewison had created “a film that has the look and sound of reality and the pulse of reality,” but some viewers were less impressed. Author James Baldwin, among other African American critics, criticized what he saw as the film’s congratulatory vision of racial reconciliation and its “unbelievable” depiction of a black man in the South.
Mr. Jewison later called “In the Heat of the Night” the first installment of a personal trilogy about race. It also included “A Soldier’s Story” and “The Hurricane” (1999), which starred Washington as real-life boxer Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, who was wrongfully imprisoned for murder and inspired the Bob Dylan song used on the soundtrack.
In interviews, Mr. Jewison has traced his interest in American race relations to his first visit to the United States, when he traveled through the South in the 1940s and was shocked to discover the “segregation” system of racial discrimination.
He had previously faced prejudice as a boy in Toronto, where he was bullied by classmates who assumed, on the basis of his surname, that he was Jewish. In fact, his family was Methodist and Anglican, United Artists executives notwithstanding They were under the same false impression, in his telling, when they showed him “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Norman Frederick Jewison was born in Toronto on July 21, 1926. His parents ran a general store and post office below their apartment. In his 2004 memoir This Horrible Work Was Good for Me, he recalls spending most of his childhood Saturdays at the movies, where he paid a dime to see two movies and then re-enacted the films for his friends.
Mr. Jewison served in the Canadian Navy during World War II, and after graduating from the University of Toronto in 1949, he entered the emerging field of television production. He worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before being hired by CBS in the late 1950s, moving to New York to direct the musical program “Your Hit Parade” as well as Emmy Award-winning variety shows and musical specials featuring Judy Garland and Andy Williams , Jackie Gleason and Harry Belafonte.
He made his film debut in the Tony Curtis comedy “40 Pounds of Trouble” (1962) and directed some Doris Day romances before making his dramatic breakthrough with “The Cincinnati Kid” (1965), taking over the set after director Sam Peckinpah was fired. days in production.
“I was born and raised and almost died while making the movie,” Jewison later said, recalling his efforts to gain the trust of McQueen, the volatile leading man who played a Depression-era poker player. Mr. Jewison assured the star that he would portray him in a way that would maintain audience sympathy even when he lost the big game.
He also reversed an earlier decision to shoot in stark black and white: “It is He was “It’s all about the cards, for God’s sake,” he told McQueen biographer Christopher Sandford.
“The Cincinnati Kid” was a modest success, enabling Mr. Jewison to direct and produce “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” about a Soviet submarine that ran aground in New England. Starring Carl Reiner as an American on vacation who encounters the Russians, including Alan Arkin, the film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Jewison capitalized on his success to shoot his next film, “In the Heat of the Night,” on location rather than in a studio – a practice he later used for films including “Fiddler,” which he shot in Yugoslavia, and “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1973). , which he filmed in Israel and the West Bank and also co-wrote.
He made both films during his time spent nearly a decade in Europe, where he lived after experiencing what he described as a loss of faith in “the American dream,” as a result of the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert. Kennedy, and the reactionary sentiments that helped President Richard Nixon win the election.
In 1978, Mr. Jewison settled on a farm near Toronto, where he harvested maple syrup and raised Hereford cattle when he wasn’t working in films. He also founded what is now the Canadian Film Center to promote the country’s film industry, and in 1992, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.
In 1953 he married Margaret Ann “Dixie” Dixon, who died in 2004. Mr. Jewison later married Lynn St. David. In addition to his wife, survivors include three children from his first marriage, Kevin Jewison, Michael Jewison and Jenny Snyder. And five grandchildren.
One of Mr. Jewison’s last films, the theatrical version of “Dinner with Friends” (2001), was released on HBO after he found little support for the project from studio executives. Films like “In the Heat of the Night” and “A Soldier’s Story” aren’t being produced anymore — at least not by major Hollywood film companies, he said.
“They would say these films were too wordy, too cerebral, too dialogue-heavy,” Jewison told The Times in 2001. “They often want films with minimal dialogue, a lot of action and limited adult themes to sell overseas,” Jewison told The Times in 2001. Many aspects of our lives have disappeared from movie screens. They now appear on cable.
