Fiddler on the Roof

Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Timing: 3:1 (181 min)

7.699/10
542

7.83/10
2010

8/10
46481

All about film

Video 7

Photo 38

Actors and characters

Release date

1971-11-03

Country

United States

Production

United Artists, The Mirisch Company, Cartier Productions

Genre

Drama, Romance

Budget

$9 000 000

Revenue

$83 304 330

Website

Director

Norman Jewison

Actors

Topol, Norma Crane, Leonard Frey, Molly Picon, Paul Mann, Rosalind Harris, Michele Marsh, Neva Small, Paul Michael Glaser, Ray Lovelock
All actors and roles (10)

Scenario

Producer

Norman Jewison, Walter Mirisch

Operator

Oswald Morris

Composer

Jerry Bock

Artist

Audition

Lynn Stalmaster

Editing

Antony Gibbs, Robert Lawrence, Larry DeWaay
All team (34)

• The film unexpectedly became very popular in Japan, where the audience resonated with the theme of the destruction of a centuries-old way of life.
• Director Norman Jewison made Tutte Lemkov, who played the violinist, try seven different instruments until he found the one that suited him best.
• The film's title is taken from a painting by Marc Chagall (1887-1985) depicting a funeral and a man on a rooftop playing the violin.
• Several times throughout the film, people touch a box attached to the doorframe. Inside is a parchment scroll made from the skin of a kosher animal, containing a portion of the Shma prayer (a Jewish liturgical text consisting of four quotations from the Pentateuch; daily recitation of the prayer is prescribed as a commandment in Deuteronomy). Verses from the two parts of the Shma prayer (Deut. 6:4-9 and Deut. 11:13-21) are inscribed on the inside of the scroll. It is traditionally affixed to the doorpost in Jewish homes.
• Jewish customs and traditions are depicted in the film with particular care.
• The film crew traveled all over Europe in search of a filming location. Permission to film in the USSR was not granted (the film's action took place in pre-revolutionary Russia, in Ukraine, south of Kyiv), and the producers ultimately settled on Yugoslavia (now Croatia). Much of the villages there had been destroyed by 1919 during the Russian Civil War, and hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed and displaced.
• The first television broadcast in the United States attracted 40 million viewers.
• Marble dust was used to simulate snow.
• Hundreds of candles, not electric lighting, were used in the sunrise and sunset scenes.
• To ensure greater authenticity, the film's artist, Robert F. Boyle, studied the plans of a hundred synagogues that existed in Ukraine at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and then constructed the one that was filmed.
• Topol played the role of an old milkman aged 35.