Exodus (1960 Film)

''Exodus'' is a 1960 American epic historical drama film about the founding of the State of Israel. Produced and directed by Otto Preminger, the screenplay was adapted by Dalton Trumbo from the 1958 novel of the same name by Leon Uris. The film stars an ensemble cast including Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Ralph Richardson, Peter Lawford, Lee J. Cobb, Sal Mineo, John Derek and George Maharis. The film's soundtrack music was written by Ernest Gold.

Preminger openly hired screenwriter Trumbo, who had been on the Hollywood blacklist for over a decade for being a communist and forced to work under assumed names. Together with ''Spartacus'', also written by Trumbo, ''Exodus'' is credited with ending the practice of blacklisting in the US motion picture industry.

Released on December 15, 1960 by United Artists, the film earned $8.7 million at the box office in the United States and Canada, and $20 million worldwide.

Plot

After the Second World War, Katherine "Kitty" Fremont, a widowed American nurse, is sightseeing in Cyprus following a tour of duty for the U.S. Public Health Service in Greece. Her guide mentions the Karaolos internment camp on Cyprus, where thousands of Jews — many Holocaust survivors — are being detained. The British refuse them passage to Palestine. Kitty visits British General Sutherland, who knew her late husband. He suggests she volunteer at the internment camp for a few days. Kitty declines, feeling uncomfortable around Jews, but reconsiders shortly after.

Haganah rebel Ari Ben Canaan, a former captain in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army during WWII, obtains a cargo ship. He smuggles 611 Jews aboard for an illegal voyage to Palestine. Military authorities discover the plan and blockade Famagusta harbor, preventing the ship's departure. The refugees stage a hunger strike, and Ari threatens to blow up the ship and the refugees. The British relent and allow the ship, rechristened the ''Exodus'', to set sail.

While at the camp, Kitty meets Karen Hansen Clement, a Danish-Jewish teenager. Kitty grows fond of Karen and offers to take her to America. Karen, whose mother and siblings were Holocaust victims, is searching for her missing father. She is also aligned with the Zionist cause and eventually declines Kitty's offer.

Meanwhile, opposition to partitioning Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states intensifies. Karen's young beau, Dov Landau, joins the Irgun, a radical pro-Zionist militant group led by Akiva Ben Canaan, Ari's uncle. Akiva first interrogates Dov, forcing his confession to being a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, where he learned bombing skills, and that Nazi guards sodomized him. Akiva's violent activities run counter to his brother Barak, Ari's father, who heads the mainstream Jewish Agency, working to create a Jewish state through political and diplomatic means. Barak fears the Irgun will derail these efforts.

Karen goes to Gan Dafna, a fictional Jewish kibbutz near Mount Tabor, close to the moshav where Ari was raised. Kitty and Ari fall in love, but Kitty pulls back, feeling she is an outsider after meeting Ari's family and learning about his previous love: Dafna, a young woman kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by Arabs, who is the Gan Dafna kibbutz's namesake.

Ari helps locate Karen's father, Dr. Clement, who is a permanent in-patient at a mental hospital in Jerusalem. He is in a dissociative state, caused by the horrors he suffered in a Nazi concentration camp. Karen is devastated that her father does not recognize her.

Akiva is arrested, imprisoned by the British in Acre fortress, and sentenced to hang after the Irgun bomb the King David Hotel. Ari plots an escape to free Akiva and Haganah and Irgun prisoners. Dov, who eluded capture, turns himself in to utilize his bomb expertise to facilitate the Acre Prison break.

Hundreds of prisoners escape, including Akiva, who is fatally wounded during the ensuing chase. Ari is also wounded, but makes it to Gan Dafna, where he is treated. Ari is moved to Abu Yesha, an Arab village near Gan Dafna, where his lifelong Arab friend, Taha, is the ''mukhtar''. While recovering, Ari develops a life-threatening infection; Kitty saves his life, which rekindles their romance. Meanwhile, the British arrest Dr. Lieberman after discovering an illegal weapons cache hidden the children's village.

The United Nations votes to partition the land into a "Jewish State" and an "Arab State," but Arab nationals plot to attack Gan Dafna and massacre the Jews, including children. Taha warns Ari of the impending attack, though he must join the Grand Mufti in fighting Israel's establishment. Ben Canaan orders the younger children evacuated during the night as a small detachment of Palmach troops arrives to reinforce Gan Dafna's defenses.

Karen, ecstatic over the prospect of the new nation, goes to see Dov, who is on night patrol at the Gan Dafna perimeter. She proclaims her love for Dov, who says they will marry when the war is over. As Karen returns to Gan Dafna in the dark, she is ambushed and murdered by Arabs. Dov discovers her body the following morning. The same day, Taha's body is found hanging in his village, killed by the Grand Mufti. A Star of David is carved into his body and a swastika and signs saying "Jude" are on village walls.

Karen and Taha are buried in one grave. Ari eulogizes them, saying that one day Jews and Arabs will peacefully share the land. Ari, Kitty, Dov, and a Palmach contingent board trucks, headed to the battle.

Cast

* Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan
* Eva Marie Saint as Kitty Fremont
* Ralph Richardson as Gen. Sutherland
* Peter Lawford as Maj. Caldwell
* Lee J. Cobb as Barak Ben Canaan
* Sal Mineo as Dov Landau
* John Derek as Taha
* Hugh Griffith as Plato Mandria
* Martin Miller as Dr. Odenheim
* Gregory Ratoff as Lakavitch
* Felix Aylmer as Dr. Ernst Lieberman
* David Opatoshu as Akiva Ben-Canaan
* Jill Haworth as Karen Hansen Clement
* Marius Goring as Von Storch
* Alexandra Stewart as Jordana Ben Canaan
* Michael Wager as David Ben Ami
* Martin Benson as Mordechai
* Paul Stevens as Reuben
* Victor Maddern as Sergeant
* George Maharis as Yoav
* Esther Ofarim as Mrs. Hirschberg

Production

''Exodus'' was filmed on location in Israel and Cyprus. Although filming key elements of ''Exodus'' on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus was authentic, as it was the location of the British internment camps for Jewish refugees trying to reach Palestine, it was difficult, as the island was in the middle of a Greek insurgency against British rule, led by the Greek nationalist organisation EOKA. EOKA was considered a terrorist organisation by the British authorities in Cyprus, who were opposed to the filming of a movie on the island that seemed to combine anti-British sentiments with a storyline that appeared to show terrorist action could be successful. As a result, the British authorities refused to help Preminger with the logistical side of filming. The only assistance given by the British authorities was the placement of an armed guard on the large number of decommissioned rifles used as props in the film, to prevent them from falling into the hands of EOKA and being recommissioned.

Relations between the director and actors were difficult, particularly with the male lead, Paul Newman. After Newman's suggested changes to the script were rejected by Preminger, and the actor given a dressing down for making the suggestions, Newman hid a mannequin on a high balcony on which he was due to play out a fight scene. At the end of the scene, Newman pretended to stumble, and threw the mannequin over the balcony. Not realising this was a practical joke, Preminger collapsed and required medical attention. At other times, Preminger and Newman were barely on speaking terms.

Uris was originally signed to write a screenplay of the film, but Preminger rejected his script as excessively anti-British and anti-Arab. Preminger instead hired blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, with whom he collaborated on a script in forty days. Trumbo had never visited Israel, resulting in initial errors, such as locating the site of the Acre prison break, located in a coastal city, as taking place in the middle of the desert. Trumbo also made less use of Biblical themes than Uris wanted. His biographer wrote that Trumbo refused "to go back to Old Testament times, and follow the Jews through the centuries of the Diaspora and the horror of the Holocaust." Trumbo and Preminger did not share Uris's preoccupation with history as moulding the Israeli national character.

Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint had previously appeared together as the teenage lovers who subsequently marry in a 1955 musical version of Thornton Wilder's '' Our Town'' with Frank Sinatra as the stage manager, an episode of the anthology television series ''Producer's Showcase''. Newman and Saint sing a duet during the malt shop sequence.

The Karen Hansen part was originally offered to Hayley Mills, but her parents turned it down.

It was one of John Derek's last appearances as an actor.

Reception

Bosley Crowther of ''The New York Times'' described the film as a "dazzling, eye-filling, nerve-tingling display of a wide variety of individual and mass reactions to awesome challenges and, in some of its sharpest personal details, a fine reflection of experience that rips the heart." The film's "principal weakness," Crowther wrote, "is that it has so much churning around in it that no deep or solid stream of interest evolves—save a vague rooting interest in the survival of all the nice people involved."Crowther, Bosley (December 16, 1960)
Screen: A Long 'Exodus'"
''The New York Times''. 44.

Philip K. Scheuer of the ''Los Angeles Times'' described the film as "a kaleidoscopic yet memorable impression of highlights from the long-time best seller by Leon Uris," with a "generally excellent" screenplay by Trumbo. '' Variety'' declared, "There is room to criticize 'Exodus'—its length might be shortened to advantage; perhaps Preminger tried to crowd too much incident from the book for dramatic clarity, and some individual scenes could be sharpened through tighter editing. But the good outweighs the shortcomings. Preminger can take pride in having brought to the screen a Twentieth Century birth of a nation."

Richard L. Coe of ''The Washington Post'' stated that the film "has this vitality of the immediate and will be of incalculable influence in reaching those unfamiliar with the background of Israel ... It is safe to say that in several years, when this film will have played much of the world, its influence will have become critical." ''The Monthly Film Bulletin'' wrote, "''Exodus'' lacks the historical imagination to cope with its theme on one level, the human awareness to dramatise it on the other. At the end of three and a half hours, its approach remains more exhausting than exhaustive. And the determination to be fair to all sides—almost the only character the script is prepared to dislike is the ''Nazi'' leader of the Arab terrorists—produces some strange consequences."

Roger Angell of ''The New Yorker'' wrote, "Such a bubbling pot of intrigue, violence, and hatred would almost seem to guarantee a lively film, but Mr. Preminger has approached his task with a painstaking reverence that would have been more suitable if he had been filming the original work of this title. He permits nearly everyone in his large cast to state his ideological and political convictions before and after each new turn of events, and the result is an awesome talkfest that is all too rarely interrupted by the popping of rifles."

Reviews criticizing the film’s political message only appeared in less mainstream sources. For example, Gideon Bachmann, who was present in Palestine in 1947, wrote in Film Quarterly (published by University of California Press) that the film was "dishonest" and propaganda designed to be "the best promotion Israel ever had."Bachmann, Gideon (April 1, 1961)
Review: Exodus by Otto Preminger'"
''Film Quarterly''. 56.

The film holds an approval rating of 65% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 17 reviews, with an average rating of 6/10. On Metacritic, it has a 70/100, based on 11 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews.

By September 1961, although having only played 22 locations overseas, the film had earned theatrical rentals of $14 million worldwide.

Awards and nominations

* The film was screened at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival, but was not entered into the competition for the Golden Palm.

Soundtrack

The musical score, by Ernest Gold, won the Academy Award for Best Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture, and the main theme has been widely recorded by other artists. A version by Ferrante & Teicher reached number 2 on the ''Billboard'' Hot 100 in January 1961. Other version were recorded by jazz saxophonist Eddie Harris, Mantovani, Grant Green, Manny Albam, Andy Williams, Peter Nero, Connie Francis, Quincy Jones, the 1960s British instrumental band the Eagles and the Duprees, who sang the theme with lyrics written by Pat Boone. Other artists to record the song include gospel pianist Anthony Burger (in the Gaither Vocal Band's "I Do Believe"), Edith Piaf (who sang French lyrics) and classical pianist Maksim Mrvica. Davy Graham reinvented the main theme on his 1963 album '' The Guitar Player''. Trey Spruance of the Secret Chiefs 3 rescored the theme for "surf band and orchestra" on the album 2004 '' Book of Horizons''. Howard Stern uses it for comedic effect when discussing aspects of Jewish life. The WWF used the main theme as wrestler Mr. Perfect's song. A portion of the theme was played live by '70s Southern rock band Black Oak Arkansas, whose three lead guitarists used eBows to play the theme in harmony, embedded into an arrangement of the Buddy Holly song "Not Fade Away."

Legacy

Often characterized as a "Zionist epic", the film has been identified by many commentators as having been enormously influential in stimulating Zionism and support for Israel in the United States. While Preminger's film softened the anti-British and anti-Arab sentiment of the novel, the film remains contentious for its depiction of the Arab–Israeli conflict.''Gunfight at the O.K. Kibbutz: Israel in the American reflection''. Bruce Robbins. (May 21, 2019)

'' Mondoweiss''

See also

* List of American films of 1960
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Notes

References

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External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Exodus
1960 films
1960s war drama films
1960 war films
American epic films
American war drama films
1960s English-language films
Epic films based on actual events
Films scored by Ernest Gold
Films about the Israel Defense Forces
Films about Jews and Judaism
Films about refugees
Films about terrorism
Films based on American novels
Films directed by Otto Preminger
Films set in 1947
Films set in 1948
Films set in Cyprus
Films set in Israel
Films set in Mandatory Palestine
Films set in the Mediterranean Sea
Films set in prison
Films set on ships
Films shot in Cyprus
Films shot in Israel
Films featuring a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe winning performance
Films that won the Best Original Score Academy Award
Films with screenplays by Dalton Trumbo
United Artists films
War epic films
1960 drama films
Films set in the British Empire
Films about the aftermath of the Holocaust
Films about the Arab–Israeli conflict
1960s American films
American propaganda films
Zionism in the United States
Race-related controversies in film
English-language war drama films