Exodus

Socked in my snow on Monday, I had the perfect way to pass a housebound day--a three-and-a-half hour epic film, Exodus, directed by Otto Preminger, and released in 1960.

Dealing with events leading up to the founding of Israel in 1948, Exodus is very typical of films from the period--self-important and made on a grand scale. Rambling around in there might have been a great film, but Preminger, never one to be a model of subtlety, was not interested in the less-is-more theory.

The script, by Dalton Trumbo, betrays what might have been, especially in the film's first section, which details a group of Jewish refugees who have been detained in Cyprus. The history is this: European Jews who wanted to relocate to Palestine were kept from doing so by the British, who did not wish to make trouble with the Arabs there. But there was already a Jewish presence in Palestine, who were working to make a homeland. They were largely in two groups: the Haganah, and the radical Irgun, who were labeled terrorists for blowing up British installations.

Paul Newman starred as a daring member of the Haganah. Posing as a British officer, he managed to get over 600 Jews aboard a ship in Cyprus, intending to take them to Palestine. He is blocked from leaving the harbor, but those aboard go on a hunger strike, and eventually they succeed.

The rest of the film deals with a jailbreak, and then, following the U.N. vote to create Israel, an attack by Arabs against a kibbutz.

As I type this, I realize that this sounds more exciting than the film itself. Part of the problem is a clumsy structure. We are introduced to events in the film by an American character, a widow played by Eva Marie Saint. She visits Cyprus to pay a call on the British general who was friends with her husband, and ends up getting involved when she befriends a Jewish girl who she wishes to adopt. Saint's character frequently mentions that she feels like an outsider, which is exactly what she is. There are many scenes that Saint seems like a person who has wandered into frame accidentally. I almost laughed out loud at the end, when she's holding a gun.

Also in the cast is Sal Mineo, who was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as a radical young Jew. His nomination surely stems from a scene in which, under interrogation by the Irgun, he admits what he did during his imprisonment at Auschwitz.

Viewed through the lens of fifty years hindsight, the casting is the most interesting aspect of this film. Mineo was Italian. Newman's father was Jewish, although he looked anything but, while Jill Haworth, who played the young girl, was British and looked positively Nordic. Trumbo's script was thus able to play off of assumptions of how Jews were supposed to look. There's a scene in the film when Newman, while posing as a British officer, mocks a casually anti-Semitic major, played by Peter Lawford, who tells him that he can spot a Jew immediately. Newman, playing along, says that he can even smell them.

But the film doesn't do any favors for Arabs, when it casts John Derek as an Arab. It recalls the days when guys like Jeff Chandler played Indians.

Today I imagine that the longest lasting legacy of Exodus is the instantly recognizable theme music by Ernest Gold, which won the Oscar.