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 Karaolosinternment camp on Cyprus, where thousands of Jews — many of them Holocaust survivors — are detained by the British, who refuse them passage to Palestine. Kitty visits British General Sutherland, who knew her late husband. When Sutherland suggests she volunteer at the internment camp for a few days, Kitty declines, citing she would feel uncomfortable around Jews. She reconsiders shortly after one of the General's staff officers, Major Freddy Caldwell, makes an anti-Semitic remark.
Haganah rebel Ari Ben Canaan, a decorated former captain in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army in the Second World War, obtains a cargo ship. He smuggles 611 Jews out of the camp and onto the ship for an illegal voyage to Mandatory Palestine. Military authorities discover the plan and blockadeFamagusta harbor, preventing the ship's departure. The refugees stage a hunger strike, during which the camp's doctor dies and Ari threatens to blow up the ship and the refugees. The British relent and allow the ship, rechristened the Exodus, to sail.
While helping at the camp, Kitty meets Karen Hansen Clement, a Danish-Jewish teenager. Kitty grows fond of Karen and offers to take her back to America with her. Karen, whose mother and siblings were murdered in the Holocaust, is searching for her missing father. She has also aligned herself with the Zionist cause, and, wanting to go to Palestine, eventually turns down Kitty's offer.
Meanwhile, opposition to partitioning Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states is intensifying. Karen's young beau, Dov Landau, is recruited into the Irgun, a radical pro-Zionist militant group. Ari Ben Canaan's uncle, Akiva, who heads the Irgun, first interviews Dov. Before swearing him in, Akiva forces Dov into confessing he was a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz and was sodomized by the Nazi camp guards; this is where Dov acquired his bomb expertise. 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, especially as the British have placed a price on Akiva's head.
Karen goes to live at Gan Dafna, a fictional Jewish kibbutz near Mount Tabor near the moshav where Ari was raised.[5] Kitty and Ari have fallen in love, but Kitty pulls back, feeling like 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 namesake of the Gan Dafna kibbutz.
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 that is borderline vegetative, caused by the horrors he suffered in the past while in a Nazi concentration camp. When Karen visits, she is devastated that her father does not recognize her.
Akiva is arrested, imprisoned in Acre fortress, and sentenced to hang after the Irgun bomb the King David Hotel. The British authorities fail to heed a warning of the planned bombing which results in dozens of fatalities. Ari plots an escape to save Akiva's life, and free Haganah and Irgun fighters imprisoned by the British military. Dov, who eluded capture after the hotel bombing, turns himself in to utilize his bomb-making expertise to facilitate the Acre Prison break.
Hundreds of prisoners escape, including Akiva, though he is fatally wounded as he and Ari evade a roadblock. Ari is also wounded, but makes it to Gan Dafna where Dr. Lieberman removes a bullet from Ari. With the British on Ari's trail, he is taken to Abu Yesha, an Arab village near Gan Dafna, where his lifelong Arab friend, Taha, is the mukhtar. When a recovering Ari develops a life-threatening infection, Kitty saves his life. This rekindles their romance. Meanwhile, the British arrest Dr. Lieberman when they find an illegal weapons cache hidden within the children's village.
The United Nations votes to partition the land into a "Jewish State" and an "Arab State," but Arab nationals commanded by Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, plot to attack Gan Dafna and massacre the Jews, including the children. Taha warns Ari of the impending attack, though he reluctantly says he must join the Grand Mufti in fighting the establishment of Israel. Ben Canaan orders the younger children be evacuated to safety 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 find Dov (who is on night patrol at the Gan Dafna perimeter) and proclaims her love for him. Dov says they will marry when the war is over. As Karen returns to Gan Dafna, she is ambushed and murdered by Arabs. Dov discovers her lifeless 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 together in one grave. Ari eulogizes them, saying that someday Jews and Arabs will share the land in peace. While others in turn add a shovelful of dirt to the grave, Dov, angry and heartbroken, bypasses the shovel and moves on. Ari, Kitty, Dov, and a Palmach contingent board trucks, heading off to the battle.
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.[6]
Relations between the director and actors were difficult, particularly with the male lead, Paul Newman.[7] 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.[8]
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.[9]
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 Jill Haworth part was offered to Hayley Mills whose parents turned it down.[10]
It was one of John Derek's last appearances as an actor.[11]
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."[1]
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.[12]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."[13]
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."[14]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."[15]
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."[16]
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."[17]
The film holds an approval rating of 65% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 17 reviews, with an average rating of 6/10.[18] On Metacritic, it has a 70/100, based on 11 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews.[19]
By September 1961, although having only played 22 locations overseas, the film had earned theatrical rentals of $14 million worldwide.[20]
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (June 2022)
Often characterized as a "Zionist epic",[28][29] the film has been identified by many commentators as having been enormously influential in stimulating Zionism and support for Israel in the United States.[30][31][32] 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.[33][34][35]
1 2 Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company That Changed the Film Industry, University of Wisconsin Press, 1987 p. 133
↑ "All-time top film grossers", Variety January 8, 1964 p. 37. Please note this figure is rentals accruing to film distributors, not total money earned at the box office.
↑ An actual kibbutz named Dafna is located near the present Lebanese border.
↑ Tony Shaw, Cinematic Terror: A Global History of Terrorism on Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) p. 67
↑ Foster Hirsch, Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King (New York: Knopf, 2007)
↑ A. E. Hotchner, Paul and Me: 53 Years of Adventures and Misadventures with Paul Newman (London: Simon & Schuster, 2014)
↑ Gunfight at the O.K. Kibbutz: Israel in the American reflection. Bruce Robbins. (May 21, 2019). . Mondoweiss
Related Research Articles
The Irgun, officially the National Military Organization in the Land of Israel, was a Zionist paramilitary organization that operated in Mandatory Palestine between 1931 and 1948. It was an offshoot of the older and larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. The Irgun has been viewed as a terrorist organization or organization which carried out terrorist acts.
Zionist political violence refers to acts of violence or terrorism committed by Zionists in support of establishing and maintaining a Jewish state in Palestine. These actions have been carried out by individuals, paramilitary groups, and the Israeli government, from the early 20th century to the present day, as part of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Haganah was the main Zionist paramilitary organization that operated for the Yishuv in the British Mandate for Palestine. It was founded in 1920 to defend the Yishuv's presence in the region, and was formally disbanded in 1948, when it became the core force integrated into the Israel Defense Forces shortly after the Israeli Declaration of Independence.
Leon Marcus Uris was an American author of historical fiction who wrote many bestselling books, including Exodus and Trinity.
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Yehiel Dov Dresner was an Irgun member in pre-state Mandatory Palestine and one of 12 Olei Hagardom.
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