Norman Jewison, who would have turned 100 years old on July 21, is probably not the first name that would come to mind when thinking about the filmmakers who emerged during the New Hollywood of the late ’60s and ’70s. The Canada-born director was more workmanlike than maverick, always diligently moving from one project to the next. But though Jewison has not garnered the same auteur status as other filmmaking peers, few of them could claim to be behind the number of household name films that he was.
Jewison seemed to touch every shape and size of movie that Hollywood could produce: starry romantic comedies (“Moonstruck,” “Best Friends”), Broadway musical adaptations (“Fiddler on the Roof,” “Jesus Christ Superstar”), shot-on-location crime yarns (“In the Heat of the Night” “F.I.S.T.”) and even a dystopian sports thriller (“Rollerball”). Through four decades, and across massive shifts in culture, Jewison remained a reliably engaging storyteller, defined by his consideration of social issues and his ability to draw new sides out of some of Hollywood’s most prominent stars, several of whom turned in career-defining performances in his films.
Speaking at a Directors Guild screening of “In the Heat of the Night,” held in tribute to Jewison after his death in 2024 at the age of 97, former DGA president Taylor Hackford shared that Jewison had told him, “I want people to recognize themselves in the films that I make.” It is as simple and appropriate an explanation there could be for the filmmaker’s career-long relevance.
“In the Heat of the Night” is one of many times Jewison invited viewers to recognize themselves, particularly in the performance of Sidney Poitier as Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia homicide detective who is enlisted by a racist police chief (Rod Steiger) to investigate the murder of a factory tycoon in small-town Mississippi. In his essay considering the film for its 2019 Criterion Collection edition, film critic K. Austin Collins wrote how Poitier’s performance both complicates and expands on the tensions within the film’s central relationship, writing that the actor is “playing a trope, however well-written, while trying to bring a real Black rage, a simmering bit of metatext about the role itself, to the movie’s politics.” Though it was Steiger who won the bulk of awards, including the Golden Globe, “In the Heat of the Night” would seem far less relevant to audiences, and far less alive, without Poitier’s fiery turn. Tibbs remains the star’s defining role (he reprised the character in two sequels).
“In the Heat of the Night,” which earned Jewison a Golden Globe nomination for best director, came early in the filmmaker’s career. Five years before that, he made his feature debut with the Tony Curtis comedy “40 Pounds of Trouble.” Under contract at Universal, Jewison followed with two amiable Doris Day features. But his ambitions lay elsewhere. As he told the Los Angeles Times in 2019, “I wanted to make dramatic films. I was getting a little frustrated.”
Naturally, he leapt at the opportunity to take over directing on the poker drama “The Cincinnati Kid” when the film’s star, Steve McQueen, offered him the job. (Sam Peckinpah, then also establishing himself as a filmmaker, had been booted from the project by a producer.)
“The Cincinnati Kid” was a modest success, but it was Jewison’s first film to draw awards attention. Pre-Code mainstay Joan Blondell, then in her fifties, earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance as Lady Fingers, an aging gambling diva who encounters McQueen’s lead. “Cincinnati Kid” was also the first realization of Jewison’s ability to gain his actors’ trust and push them into new territory. The director reteamed with McQueen three years later on the slick romance “The Thomas Crown Affair”; prior to playing the titular playboy-thief, McQueen had hardly ever worn a suit on-screen.
Two years earlier, Jewison had plucked Alan Arkin from the New York theater scene for the Cold War comedy “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.” Playing a Soviet lieutenant washed up on American shores, the role was Arkin’s first film performance; he earned a Golden Globe nomination. Jewison also directed Al Pacino to a Globe nod, capping off the actor’s emergent ’70s with a commanding turn in the court drama “…And Justice for All.”
But it was “Moonstruck,” Jewison’s most winning classic, that best demonstrated the director’s command with actors. A romantic comedy spoken in Italian American gusto, the film is an incandescent portrait of the surrender of love, filled with gigantic, larger-than-life performances that never upstage the characters’ acute desperations. “Moonstruck” won Globes best actress in a musical or comedy and supporting actress for Cher and Olympia Dukakis, respectively; it also earned a best actor nod for Nicolas Cage, who plays the virile love interest to Cher.
“To Norman, who is, for me, a master craftsman, a consummate teacher, someone who has changed my work, I’m deeply grateful,” Dukakis thanked her director in her acceptance speech at the Globes.
Jewison was nominated for best director three times at the Golden Globes, for “In the Heat of the Night,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and his penultimate feature, the 2000 boxer biopic “The Hurricane.” His films collectively received 41 Golden Globe nominations, with 12 wins including Chaim Topol for “Fiddler,” Meg Tilly for “Agnes of God” and Denzel Washington for “The Hurricane.” Those three titles alone demonstrate how versatile Jewison was; few filmmakers could claim to have impacted as diverse and wide an audience.
Cher put it best, in a social media post, honoring Jewison after his death: “Scripts,Actors,Etc,NEEDED U DEAR. NORMAN JEWISON LIVES ON THROUGH HIS WORK.”
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