As a measure of the significance of the career of filmmaker Norman Jewison, let us consider the following: After his death this month at age 97, is there a single living filmmaker who can boast of having directed Edward G. Robinson and Sidney Poitier, Doris Day and Steve McQueen, and Al Pacino and Cher?
Jewison, who died on Jan. 20, worked with each of those stars and many more. Many were nominated for Oscars — some won. That he called “action” on sets with such a range of performers is a testament to his longevity and, more importantly, his adaptability. Although Hollywood’s Golden Age was cresting by the time Jewison began directing in the early 1960s, he did not allow himself to be swept aside. Instead, the filmmaker made himself relevant to changing sensibilities. When audiences no longer favored superficial romantic comedies — such as one of two vehicles he made with Day, Send Me No Flowers (1964) — he turned to hipper material and edgier stars, including the classics The Cincinnati Kid (1965) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), both starring McQueen. And when the public started to demand pictures that reflected the tumult and turmoil of the age, he again delivered with In the Heat of the Night (1967).
Perhaps this track record exposes Jewison to charges of artistic opportunism, but surely he read audience preferences no more or less carefully than anyone in Hollywood. And if his evolution from helming comical confections to serious dramas was calculated, no one could doubt the director’s sincerity on any given project: When we watch The Thomas Crown Affair, we know that the director is determined to entertain and beguile us. When we watch In the Heat of the Night, we are sure that its maker is striving to challenge us and provoke our thoughts.
Born in Toronto to Percy and Dorothy Jewison, Norman had the advantage of growing up far from the American movie industry. As a member of the Royal Canadian Navy, he served in World War II, and although he was heavily involved in student theater at Victoria College in Toronto, his first professional opportunities came in public television in England and then in his home country of Canada. It would be years before he reached a movie set.
If his geographic remoteness from the glitz and glamor of Hollywood instilled in Jewison some of the humane gentleness that defined later films, his initial assignments in America nurtured his unabashed love for performers. Working as a director at CBS, Jewison garnered attention as the director of specials with entertainers as eclectic as Judy Garland, Danny Kaye, and Harry Belafonte.
Transitioning to feature films, Jewison seemed, at first glance, to be a competent but undistinguished maker of featherweight comedies, including his debut, 40 Pounds of Trouble (1962), starring Tony Curtis and Suzanne Pleshette. Several more movies in this vein followed, including the two films with the ever-winsome Day, before Jewison hitched his wagon to a considerably different sort of character: the irritable, wired, one-step-away-from-being-criminal McQueen. Sharp, shapely, and sexy, The Cincinnati Kid and The Thomas Crown Affair deserved to be the hits they were, but in between those films came the decisive shift in the director’s career: In the Heat of the Night, starring Poitier as a black police detective contending with both a murder investigation and pervasive racist attitudes in small-town Mississippi at midcentury.
A multiple Oscar winner, including for best picture, In the Heat of the Night set the pattern for many Jewison movies to follow: They were well acted, well produced, and predictably liberal in their messages. Back then, it may have been easy to roll one’s eyes at such productions as the labor-union drama F.I.S.T. (1978), the religious mystery Agnes of God (1985), or the Vietnam veteran drama In Country (1989), but compared to the intolerant leftism that comes out of Hollywood today, these films are literate, empathetic, and eminently humanitarian in their sentiments.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
No rabble-rousing radical, Jewison can be contrasted with Hal Ashby, a film editor who rose to success under Jewison’s wing (and won an Oscar for editing In the Heat of the Night) who later became the counterculture’s director du jour with films like Harold and Maude (1971) and Shampoo (1975). Jewison may have been liberal in his convictions, but he was sufficiently, and appealingly, square in his attitudes to still be churning out lavish musicals in the early 1970s with Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and Jesus Christ Superstar (1973).
Jewison proved his sense of humor was intact with the lovely romantic comedy Moonstruck (1987), a breakthrough for Cher and an early triumph for co-star Nicolas Cage, and he rounded out his career with a series of so-so films until he was, inevitably but properly, awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1999. For once, and perhaps for the last time, Hollywood had the decency to honor a truly decent man — one, we can now see, who may be the last of his kind.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.