Exodus (Otto Preminger Films, United Artists, 1960)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After I got home from yesterday’s (Sunday, September 23) three-band concert at the Organ Pavilion in San Diego’s Balboa Park, I switched on Turner Classic Movies and watched Otto Preminger’s megalith of a film, the 1960 movie Exodus, adapted from Leon Uris’s 1958 novel that was a blockbuster hit, supposedly selling more copies than anything written since Gone With the Wind. As all the world knows, Exodus the movie (like Uris’s book) is an unabashed piece of propaganda celebrating the 1947 birth of the state of Israel in historic Palestine. Needless to say, my attitude towards Israel and its existence is considerably more jaundiced than that of Uris or the film’s auteur, producer-director Otto Preminger. I think it was a moral mistake, verging on evil, to displace the Palestinian Arabs to create a Jewish state in Palestine. The fact that this happened largely as an atonement for the Western world’s refusal to take in Jewish refugees during the Nazi Holocaust or do much of anything to stop it while it was in progress seems to me the classic example of the proverb, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” My attitude towards Israel is basically Abraham Lincoln’s attitude towards slavery before the Civil War: he thought it was wrong but was willing to allow it to continue in the places that already had it. I think the establishment of Israel was morally wrong but we’re stuck with it now, and it would do much more harm than good to get rid of it.

The villains of Exodus are the British, who were ruling Palestine under a League of Nations mandate and severely restricting Jewish immigration there; and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Palestine’s leading Muslim cleric and both spiritual and political leader. According to this film’s script, which Preminger hired Hollywood blacklistee Dalton Trumbo to write and promised him screen credit, though the Grand Mufti is never shown as an on-screen character he was working hand-in-glove with a former Nazi German officer, Von Storch (Marius Goring), to finish off the Jewish population in Palestine once and for all and dash the hopes of the liberal Labor Party that governed Israel for nearly 30 years that Jews and Arabs could live in peace there. The principal characters of Exodus are Jewish freedom fighter Ari Ben Canaan (Paul Newman, whose casting was called into question in 1960 and ever since because, even though his father was Jewish, he looks totally Anglo white); Mrs. Kitty Fremont (Eva Marie Saint), who’s been at wit’s end since her husband, a newsmagazine photographer, was killed while covering a battle; and Dov Landau (Sal Mineo), a young Holocaust survivor who was a gravedigger at Auschwitz and who was spared execution because the Nazis turned him into a Gay sex slave. (“They used me like you use a woman!” he whines in a scene that’s particularly ironic now that we’ve long known Mineo was Gay for real.) British General Sutherland (Ralph Richardson) is an old friend of Kitty’s and her late husband’s and there are rumors that he’s part-Jewish himself; it’s he who wangles permission from the British government to let the ship Olympia, which the Jews have rechristened Exodus, sail with its cargo of over 600 Jewish refugees from the island of Cyprus to Palestine. This takes place despite the opposition of his second-in-command, Major Caldwell (Peter Lawford), who refuses to let the ship sail presumably out of his own anti-Jewish prejudices. (According to the film’s imdb.com page, Preminger asked Trumbo to tone down the anti-British sentiments of Uris’s book, but the film still flopped in the U.K.)

When the Exodus nèe Olympia finally gets across the Mediterranean to Israel, Ari, his father Barak (Lee J. Cobb) and his uncle Ashiva (David Opatoshu) base themselves at a kibbutz village called Gan Dafna, which is situated on land given them by the local Arab mukhtar; he’s dead now but his son Taha (John Derek) is mukhtar now and shares his late dad’s hope of a future Israel where Jews and Arabs can live in peace. Dov Landau falls in love with 15-year-old Karen Hansen Clement (Jill Haworth, six years before she played Sally Bowles in the original Broadway production of the musical Cabaret) and also joins the Irgun, the terrorist organization headed by Menachem Begin (who later became the first Prime Minister of Israel from the Right-wing Likud party instead of Labor and still later cut Israel’s first peace treaty with an Arab country, Egypt). As an Irgun member Dov plants several bombs in British installations, including one in a toilet (actually either he plants two bombs in different toilets or one travels through the sewer pipe so it explodes in a different toilet from the one in which he planted it). Unfortunately, the hope of an Israel in which Jews and Arabs can live together in peace is dashed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in cahoots with his Nazi ally, Von Storch. The Mufti announces it’s the sacred duty of all Arabs in Israel either to exterminate all the Jews or, failing that, to flee. The Mufti, whatever his real-life politics may have been, is an important figure in Israeli demonology; Israel’s current (and seemingly eternal) prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, once blamed the entire Holocaust on him. Netanyahu said that Adolf Hitler had been willing to exile the Jews from Europe and it was the Mufti who talked him into killing them all instead – probably the stupidest thing that’s ever been said about the Holocaust aside from denying that it happened at all.

Exodus runs nearly 3 ½ hours, and there’s a tale that when it was first screened in L.A., at about 2 ½ hours in Jewish stand-up comedian Mort Sahl stood up in the theatre and called out to Preminger, “Otto – let my people go!” It finally lumbers to a close when the Arabs, responding to the Mufti’s call for jihad, sack Gar Dafna, Dov is standing guard outside the village when Karen joins him, only he sends her away – big mistake, because the Arabs immediately capture and kill her (my husband Charles noted afterwards that this is one of the few films Sal Mineo made in which his character does not die at the end). Taha is hanged by his fellow Arabs, and in one of the film’s most chilling images, his killers carve a Star of David on his chest and paint another Star of David and a swastika on nearby walls. Our hot-looking Anglo-looking Jewish stud and his equally hot-looking shiksa girlfriend order the bodies of Taha and Karen buried in a double grave – though Dov refuses the opportunity to shovel dirt over the bodies – and they ride off in a convoy of trucks going heaven knows where to continue the fight for Israel’s existence.

The original trailer claimed that Exodus the novel was the biggest seller since Gone With the Wind (another politically problematic production these days), and Otto Preminger was clearly hoping to make “a film for the ages” on the level of David Selznick’s epic. He failed because he simply wasn’t that good a director; though he made a big to-do in the credits that the entire movie was filmed on location in Israel or Cyprus (the latter proved difficult because the Cypriot government was then dealing with an insurgency that wanted to take the country over and align it with Greece, and the Cyprus authorities looked askance at supporting a movie about people rising up against a legitimate government), the film as it stands is interminable. Even the action scenes, which one would have thought would be sure-fire, are boring. The film also fails in a way that’s going to be ironic coming from me; for a while I’ve been lamenting that modern-day color films mostly use dark greens and browns and longing for the days when color films were actually colorful. Exodus is literally too damned colorful for its own good: Sam Leavitt’s cinematography and the vibrant Technicolor give us luscious picture-postcard visions of the Mediterranean and all that gorgeous desert scenery – and this plays quite against the darkness of the story about people fighting for their lives and their liberties in a revolution against a brutal oppressor (two brutal oppressors, actually: the British and the Arabs).