By Steven Suskin
24 Apr 2011

The parade of major movie musicals converted to Blu-ray continues with the 40th Anniversary edition of Fiddler on the Roof [MGM]. Norman Jewison's 1971 adaptation of the Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick-Joseph Stein musical filled the screen with Tevye and his daughters, bringing Broadway's longest running musical (for a time) to the world at large. Topol, the Israeli actor who led the original West End cast, played the leading role; a very different Tevye he was than Zero Mostel, who created the part. And this different Tevye made all the difference, movie-wise; I can't imagine the film would have been so widely embraced if they'd given us a big-screen Zero. (Mostel had already starred in the cinematic A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and "The Producers," but even so.)

The Blu-ray edition is newly remastered in high definition, with bonus items including a couple of features on director Jewison, as well as audio commentary by Jewison and Topol; a piece on John Williams, who won an Oscar for his musical adaptation; and a new-but-unused song for Perchik, "Any Day Now."

A fine film this is, and one which has had an enduring effect on audiences of all religions, races and outlooks. Can I help it if I've never been able to displace images of the stage version, which I saw when it was fresh and new, three months into the run? The magic of Fiddler, to me, is wedded to the magic of Robbins. I remember sitting there as Tevye and his family started to sing "Sabbath Prayer." Suddenly, Robbins revealed other family groups clustered around their own candles; not only on the sides of the Tevye's family but above and around them. They were positioned on scaffolding, behind the scrim, of course; but I didn't then know or care what he did, or how he did it. It simply seemed like magic, and quadrupled the effect (and the message) of the song. That is Fiddler to me; no widescreen, no vast vistas, just canvas and lights and wizardry.

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We have for years heard Ernie Kovacs praised as a visionary comedian from the early days of TV. Hard to judge, if you didn't see Kovacs during his career, which started in 1951 with an early morning show on WPTZ in Philadelphia and ended with a series of monthly specials in 1961 for ABC. On Jan. 13, 1962, Kovacs left a party at Billy Wilder's house in Beverly Hills and crashed his car into a power pole, dying at the age of 42. While dramatic and comedy series of the time were often preserved and sent out to syndication, Kovac's work — mostly on talk shows, along with some game shows and specials — wasn't. So if you didn't watch Kovacs when it aired, you didn't see Kovacs. Surviving clips appeared from time to time, including on the six-hour 1977 PBS series "The Best of Ernie Kovacs."

After his death, Kovacs' widow Edie Adams — already a Tony Award-winning actress while Ernie was still struggling to establish himself — bought up every kinescope she could find and carefully preserved them. The new Ernie Kovacs Collection [Shout] is a testament to Kovacs and to Adams, who died in 2008. Here we have 13 hours or so of Kovacs, painstakingly assembled and spread across six DVDs. And what do you know? The man was a comic genius, blithely improvising and creating new methods of using film for entertainment. Absurdist comedy, really, with surprises at every turn.

Kovacs built his TV comedy on sketches; standard, extended or brief, he seemed to let content dictate form. Nothing was too much or too little, it was all in the payoff. Consider this one, chosen from my random sampling of the set: an industrialist stands in a boardroom, around a big conference table. On the wall is a photo of a public works dam (like the Hoover). After an establishing shot, he taps the photo with a pointer — and water gushes out, flooding the actors and the set. (While Kovacs was a pioneer in trick photography, everyone here gets unquestionably soaked.) The whole thing lasts 12 seconds; a lot of work and expense for one little joke. But what a gag! What a payoff! Here and elsewhere, Kovacs displays an incisive imagination similar to that of Buster Keaton; not as a performer, but as a visually stimulating and wildly subversive comic mastermind.

"Laugh-In," you say? "Saturday Night Live"? Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show"? Yes, all of them stem from the comedy of Ernie Kovacs. The material on these tapes is not all polished; some of the jokes are improvised, some of them don't work. But Kovacs makes for compelling viewing, and what a treat that we finally have a good chunk from the archives. And now, I'll go back and watch some more of The Nairobi Trio. Trust me, they are funny.

(A note for those interested in such things: that sultry actress in the final five ABC specials from 1961, billed as "Maggi Brown," turns out to be Margaret Styne. She was married to Jule from 1962 until his death in 1994, and continues to oversee the rights to his work today.)

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If you have never been able to get the lyric "Khrushchev's due at Idlewild" out of your mind, then have I got a box set for you: Car 54 Where Are You?: The Complete First Season [Shanachie]. This was a flavorful sitcom that started in the fall of 1961, from writer/director/producer Nat Hiken. Hiken had earlier been responsible for "Sgt. Bilko"; in this case, he placed his assortment of comedic misfits in a police precinct instead of on an army base.

Joe E. Ross and the pre-"Munster" Fred Gwynne starred as officers Gunther Toody (the short one) and Francis Muldoon (the tall, skinny one). They got into assorted scrapes, every week, for 60 episodes over two seasons. The show is especially noteworthy for its array of talents. Shooting in New York — at the old Biograph Studio in the Bronx, actually — Hiken filled the cast with local talent. I remember being stunned when I went to see a Wednesday matinee of Irma La Douce at the Alvin in November 1961, at the tender age of eight, and immediately picked out Officer Muldoon as Polyte-le Mou (the tall, skinny mec — or pimp, in the argot). "Car 54" had just gone on the air in September, and there was Gwynne playing a small role. Knowing David Merrick as I later did, I can only imagine that he refused to allow Gwynne to buy his way out of his contract, even though he was starring in a new sitcom.

But Gwynne wasn't the only one. Paul Reed, who played the long-suffering Captain Block, was simultaneously singing "A Secretary Is Not a Toy" in the spanking, new How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. (A look at the episode list shows that Reed missed five early episodes, presumably shot during that show's tryout in Philadelphia.) Reed — real name, Sidney Kahn — was a wonderful foil, specializing in this sort of authority-figure-with-a-short-fuse role. He was a real musical comedy guy, creating Lt. Brannigan in Guys and Dolls; Charlie Cowell, the salesman out to nail Harold Hill in The Music Man; Mr. Bratt in How to Succeed; R.H. Macy in Here's Love; and Mr. Dobitch, that dirty old man in need of an apartment, in Promises, Promises.

Also concurrently on Broadway — at least for his first weeks on "Car 54" — was Al Lewis, just then playing Phil Silvers' henchman Moe Shtarker in Merrick's Do-Re-Mi. Lewis played Officer Leo Schnauser; he later joined Gwynne, of course, in "The Munsters." Standing out as Sylvia Schnauser was Charlotte Rae, but a glance at the extended cast list shows that Hiken grabbed all sorts of working New York actors. Guest stars across the first season include Wally Cox, Jan Murray, Molly Picon and Maureen Stapleton as a wayward gypsy.

As for that theme song — with a lyric by Hiken, to music by Rae's then-husband John Strauss — one of the calamities issuing over the call box was that Khrushchev was still at Idlewild, rhymed with "there's a scout troop short a child." (The Soviet premier had made a notorious trip to the U.N. in October 1960, on which occasion he famously pounded his shoe on a desk in protest.) I, in my pre-teen manner, always thought they should have changed the lyric to "there's a cat stuck up a tree, Khrushchev's still at Kennedy"; but by the time the airport was renamed, "Car 54" was no longer prowling the Bronx.

(Steven Suskin is author of the recently released Updated and Expanded Fourth Edition of "Show Tunes" as well as "The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations," "Second Act Trouble" and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. He also pens Playbill.com's Book Shelf and On the Record columns. He can be reached at ssuskin@aol.com.)

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