IMPRESSIVE DIRECTIONS
Biography unpacks the life and mastery of Norman Jewison, a Canadian film legend Kenneth Whyte
Iwas never much of a Norman Jewison fan. I enjoyed Moonstruck. Who didn’t? Great movie, but I saw it when it came out and I’m not sure I was aware at the time that it was a Norman Jewison film.
He didn’t really enter my consciousness until I moved to Toronto in the 1990s and began to run into him at social events. By then, he was Uncle Norm, in his mid-seventies, determined to look younger in that desperate Hollywood way. I found him polite, well-spoken, funny. He seemed more icon than a working filmmaker.
Over time, I saw a bunch more of his movies, starting with the Doris Day pictures of the early 1960s, Send Me No Flowers and The Thrill of It All. Light romantic comedies, but with a confidence and sophistication all but absent from the genre in recent decades. I enjoyed them but, again, I’m not sure I understood them as Norman Jewison pictures.
I saw Bullitt, and after that watched a bunch more Steve Mcqueen movies, including The Thomas Crown Affair, a stylish caper flick that, again, I didn’t register as Jewison’s. I enjoyed it despite its obvious flaws, as when Steve flies a sailplane that sounds like a jetliner to the accompaniment of Windmills of Your Mind.
Then I saw In the Heat of the Night, at least 30 years after it was made. This time I knew whose film it was — couldn’t miss it, right there in the mesmerizing title sequence. A late-night train rolls into the mangy town of Sparta, Mississippi. You know it’s hot and humid from the way the lights glow, and because Ray Charles tells you so in the soulful title song. Nothing happens except the train stops and an unidentifiable black man with an expensive suitcase steps wearily onto the platform and walks into the station, slamming the screen door in the face of a little hound wanting to follow him inside. The disappointed dog stands there looking through the screen, and you’re feeling all sticky and tired like you’ve also just got off the same train. You read “directed by Norman Jewison.” It’s quite an entrance.
And from there until the closing sequence, everything works. Every second of every scene, whether Rod Steiger (Chief Gillespie) is on screen or Sidney Poitier (Virgil Tibbs) or Lee Grant — it doesn’t matter, everything works. It’s thoughtful, funny, provocative, compulsively watchable. It still views fresh, like it was made yesterday:
To be honest, I didn’t register at first viewing the significance of In the Heat of the Night. I didn’t know that Sidney Poitier was Hollywood’s first black detective. I didn’t know movie audiences hadn’t seen a black man strike a white man before. I didn’t appreciate what a bold, shit-disturbing statement it was for a director to make in a country embroiled in a civil rights war.
All of which is to say that by the time I discussed with Ira Wells the idea of writing a biography of Norman Jewison for Sutherland House, I was interested in the man.
Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life was released this week, and I now count myself a genuine Jewison fan.
I’ve been going back and rewatching films as we’ve worked on the book: not only the Doris Day vehicles, Moonstruck, In The Heat of the Night, and The Thomas Crown Affair, but Fiddler on the Roof, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Cincinnati Kid, The Russians are Coming, …And Justice for All, Agnes of God, Other People’s Money. It’s an incredible body of work.
The best thing about Ira’s book is that it lives up to its subtitle: A Director’s Life. Yes, there’s a lot of material about the personal Norman Jewison, and the stars he worked with — it would be worth a whole other book to debate whether Sylvester Stallone or Steve Mcqueen is the greater dick — but what this biography primarily delivers is a close look at what it means to spend one’s career directing movies in Hollywood.
Books about Hollywood directors tend to be either self
He felt no shame about entertaining movie audiences and usually succeeded.
aggrandizing autobiographies, hagiographical biographies, or wonkish, worshipful film-by-film critiques. With access to Jewison’s full archive, Ira was able to write an objective and insightful narrative that tracks Jewison’s movements from the literal birth of Canadian television, to New York prime-time TV specials, to directing films in the old studio system, to the New Hollywood of the 1960s, to the blockbuster era, and beyond.
It was a constant struggle for Jewison to keep himself relevant, choose the right projects, raise money, and coax performances out of actors, some of whom he recruited and some of whom were forced on him. You see as if in real-time how many things need to come together perfectly to make a masterpiece like In the Heat of the Night.
Jewison also made his share of mistakes.
Gaily, Gaily, his effort to compete with The Graduate,a new kind of sex comedy, was a flop. Rollerball, which was supposed to be a statement against violence and corporate America, somehow became a celebration of the same.
He came up short and sold out in a variety of ways, but there are nevertheless important consistencies from one end of his career to the other. He felt no shame about entertaining movie audiences and usually succeeded. He was admirably dedicated to using film to tell truths, whether concerning the U.S. justice system, the human complications of the Vietnam war, the tragicomedy of marriage, or the mysteriousness of religious faith.
Jewison wanted his films to stand for something, which put him in constant battle with the “business” side of show business.
He can at least claim to have fought the suits to a draw, which few leaders in any large artistic endeavor can claim.
If you want some fun this summer, read the book and watch the films. You won’t be disappointed.