Word: jewison
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...role of Tevye, which he created on the stage. He has been replaced for unfathomable reasons by the Israeli star Topol, who labors under the handicap of having to project great amounts of charm and personality when he has none to spare. The credits for Fiddler list Norman Jewison as producer and director. On the basis of this and past efforts (The Thomas Crown Affair, Gaily Gaily), he might better be called an anaesthetist...
...Landlord is the first film by Hal Ashby, a former film editor for Director Norman Jewison. Ashby seems to have picked up Jewison's stylistic slickness, which is stamped all over the movie like a muddy footprint. One Landlord love scene consists of almost nothing but enormous closeups of lips and hands against a glaring white background. Ashby and Scenarist William Gunn make things easy on themselves throughout by portraying the tenants as a group of whimsical, life-loving characters out of The Time of Your Life; Elgar's snooty family is caricatured with pig-bladder subtlety...
...resultant movie, Gaily, Gaily, is a kind of Tom Jones in Chicago, a broad-shouldered knockabout farce that has no business being so comic-but is hugely funny because of Director Norman Jewison...
...Jewison's The Russians Are Coming, Keith began a new career as a deadpan comedian. Now, teamed with Bridges, he gives the liveliest performance of his career as an agnostic Catholic and whoremaster-repentant whose right hand has not consulted his left for 40 years. The pro and the amateur barge around the gaudy streets of a meticulously reconstructed 1910 Chicago, hungry for trouble. Ben treats each new experience as if he were staring down the well of life. One time he falls in and drowns. But if life is a cheat, death is a double-dealer...
Like Ben, Abram S. Ginnes' manic screenplay brims with hellishly good intentions that never quite come off. Jewison has thus been forced to pare his film drastically. Plot and continuity skip along in a flurry of quick cuts and undeveloped skits. Perhaps it is just as well. Hecht was invariably sodden with sentimentality except when he wrote with a collaborator-as in The Front Page. In editing Gaily, Gaily, Jewison has played a latter-day Charles MacArthur to Hecht's Hecht...