Exodus (1960) It dawned on us that in close to 6 years of blog reviews, we've covered a major chunk of director Otto Preminger's filmography......
He rarely receives the attention that other consequential, pivotal directors of the 50's and 60's enjoy.....we suppose that's because his films became more renowned for their controversial subject matter and taboo breaking rather than any filmmaking artistry on display in them. Preminger, a stage-trained director, possessed no real cinematic style or flair......he simply assembled top-notch all star casts and pointed the camera at them.
Like Hitchcock, he was a tireless self-promoter, and similar to Hitchcock's tongue-in-cheek "actors are cattle" persona, Preminger cultivated his reputation as a raging tyrant given to bullying his actors to extract the performances he demanded of them. (From many actors' recollections,hey confirmed that this rep was more than earned.....)
And in our moviegoing lifetime, it happens that Preminger's films were among the first we encountered when we made our transition from attending kiddie-matinee fare to watching actual 'grown up; movies.......(you know, the ones our neighborhood theater ran at night instead of Saturday afternoons......no wonder we've ended up reviewing so much of Preminger's 60's outpput.....)
"Exodus" kicked off a new era and genre of Preminger films.....lengthy, elephantine, star-studded drama epics, all of them based on doorstop best selling novels telling expansive epic stories on their subject matter. (Subsequent films included 1962's "Advise And Consent" (Washington politics - see our 3/14/17 post), 1963's "The Cardinal" (A Catholic priest rising through the ranks), 1965's "In Harm's Way" (World War 2 Navy life - see our 5/29/18 post)........and finishing up with the grotesque, off-the-rails Deep South potboiler, 1967's "Hurry Sundown" (see our post of 6/20/17)
Over the years, we've come to remember these films fondly, not only as part of our young movie-going lifetime, but to savor them as examples of ambitious, character-based storytelling......the kind of material now relegated to streaming mini-series.
Preminger immediately courted controversy with "Exodus" by hiring blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to adapt the Leon Uris novel about the the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.....but then so did Kirk Douglas who also enlisted Trumbo to script "Spartacus". With Trumbo's name clearly listed on the credits of both these major 1960 epics, Preminger and Douglas effectively broke the back of the blacklist forever.
Scored with a sweeping, memorable theme by composer Ernest Gold, "Exodus" plunges into the turmoil of British occupied Palestine, Thousands of World War 2 Jewish refugees, many of them Holocaust survivors, seek escape to the Holy Land in the hopes of forming their own independent state. With thousands of these immigrants detained by British forces in Cyprus, a fearless Jewish rebel (Paul Newman) conspires to liberate over 600 of them via a barely operable freighter to sail them to Palestine......and bring the attention of the world to the refugees plight as the United Nations plans to vote on the establishment of Israel.
Upon arrival in Palestine, the film then serves up a vast panorama of characters and incidents...... there's ideological clashes among the competing groups of Jewish rebels, the dangers of sharing a homeland with a hostile Arab population, the very beginnings of a determined, courageous new population of people attempting the near impossible task of forging a new nation.
From this point on, it would take us longer than this film's running time to detail the many parallel plotlines Preminger and Trumbo introduce in a cast fronted by Newman and Eva Marie Saint, playing an American nurse who gets caught up the struggle and in a romance with Newman. The film offers up generous portions of melodrama, action, terroristic violence, suspense, pathos and heartbreak.
Call us corny, call us old-fashioned, but every so often, but we still treasure movies like this......movies you get lost in for an entire evening (or afternoon, if you prefer). And with today's films strictly divided up into noisy CGI circuses and film festival sleeping pills, something as earnest and entertaining as "Exodus" blows in like a breath of fresh air. 4 stars (****). A smooth flight on Otto-Pilot.
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