On Broadway the role was played by Zero Mostel; in the West End by Topol. The latter was chosen to portray on screen the warm-hearted milkman Tevye in the musical drawn from the stories of Sholom Aleicheim.

His task is to marry off his three daughters which, given the poverty of their remote Ukrainian steppe prior to the Diaspora, is fraught with difficulty. With its music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, "Fiddler on the Roof" was the must-see stage musical of its time, and particularly in America it represented the atavistic feelings of those whose forebears had migrated from similar backgrounds, while offering a magnificent, noisy, singing, dancing, enchanting, emotional spectacle to Jew and Gentile alike. To Life, then.

Norman Jewison's film (who, whatever his name might suggest, is not Jewish) turns the village of Anetevka into a real place where chickens flutter in viscous mud, but retains the qualities that made the story such a hit on stage. In sequences such as Tevye's Dream, film proves even more effective than stage as the graveyard comes to life around the couple (Tevye's wife is played by Norma Crane) in their nightwear.

John Williams conducts the music, and the magical sounds of the figurative fiddler stem from the bow of Isaac Stern. Molly Picon, the great star of Yiddish theatre, plays the key role of the matchmaking Yenta and other notables in the cast include Leonard Frey, Rosalind Harris, and Paul Michael Glaser. It is hard not to feel spine tingles with numbers such as "Sunrise, Sunset", "Miracle of Miracles", or "Do You Love Me?". And of course Topol's "If I Were a Rich Man" is an indelible classic. A welcome reissue of a 1971 classic, made at Pinewood.

"Fiddler on the Roof" will be re-issued on 22nd June 2001.