[ April 20, 2024 ]
This week's Saturday Night Cinema pick is a tribute to Israel's 63rd birthday, Cast A Giant Shadow. I love this movie! The post-holocaust Jews dancing on the beach! The Brits never understood the Jewish joie.
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Could Hollywood ever make a movie like this today? Not in a million years.
Cast a Giant Shadow is an action/adventure story set at the time that Israel became a nation. This fact-based drama chronicles Israel's heroic struggle for independence under the leadership of the country's first general (Kirk Douglas). This film boasts an all-star cast, including Angie Dickinson, Frank Sinatra, Yul Brynner, and John Wayne.
The NY Times didn't totally love it, but so what — they suck.
THE dimming legend of the late Col. David (Mickey) Marcus, New York's lawyer-soldier, who helped in the battle to form the state of Israel, was brightened in the appraisal of the biography by Ted Berkman titled, "Cast a Giant Shadow," as being "wholly believable — and unforgettable." In the color film version of the book that arrived yesterday, Colonel Marcus, whose exploits were so real, varied and explosive as to be unbelievable, emerges as a contrived hero apparently almost solely responsible for everything in sight, and, anomalously, a man more concerned with romances than with his stake in the future of Israel.
Judiciously, let us say that Melville Shavelson, who adapted, produced and directed this latest chapter of Hollywood's history of Israel, was honestly responsible, in large part, for the contrivance. Mr. Shavelson did not harmfully stray from the book but in attempting to encompass a large part of all the facets of Colonel Marcus's highly complex career, he has come up with a confusing, often superficial biography.
Colonel Marcus was New York's Commissioner of Corrections under Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, a West Point graduate, a lawyer, a World War II hero who parachuted against orders ahead of the Allied advance into Europe before he was surreptiously approached in 1947 to aid Jewish forces in Israel.
[…]
There are sequences that come close to the truth and shocks of war, as those involving young boys and girls advancing through a sun-dappled wheat field against an Arab stronghold that is raked with flame-throwers, or those involving an outspoken Arab chief, who, oddly enough, comes to the aid of the Israelis.
[…]
Despite all the chauvinistic fervor they display in "Cast a Giant Shadow," Mr. Douglas and his coterie project very little of the drive, dedication or feelings that make a giant or a nation.
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11 Comments
12 years ago
Where are the MEN that created Israel and the US?
12 years ago
It has long been one of those movies that I can watch over and over again. Good choice Pamela
12 years ago
AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE LEAGUE RALLY TODAY 12PM FEDERATION SQUARE, MELBOURNE
12 years ago
ONE OF THE GREAT MOVIES OF OUR TIMES.
THIS movie,and EXODUS have had a MAJOR POSITIVE IMPACT on MANY LIVES.
There were also a couple of more PRO-ISRAEL movies that you NEVER see on any cable or other channel and they’re NOT AVAILABLE on DVD:
“JUDITH” starring Sophia Loren and Peter Finch.A GREAT MOVIE that shows the Arab Muslim -Nazi love affair and Nazi involvement in the attempt to DESTROY Israel at birth ,in 1948..
“Sword in the Desert”,a 1949 Black & White starring Dana Andrews and Jeff Chandler,that like “Cast a Giant Shadow”, has an AWESOME scene of Holocaust survivors being smuggled into THEIR OWN COUNTRY by the Jerwish underground.
12 years ago
Col. Marcus (he had a rank of General in the Israeli Army, the first Israeli general since the time of the Bible) is buried at West Point.
12 years ago
Yay! Thanks for finding it, Pamela.
12 years ago
Great movie! Had never seen it before. Thanks.
12 years ago
Col.Marcus is the ONLY one buried at West Point that died fighting under another flag,indicative of the FRIENDSHIP this country has had for Israel from Day 1.
12 years ago
Thanks for making that video available. I had never seen it before. It looks a little like today in Israel except Israel can kick a lot more ass!!
12 years ago
I’ve never even heard of this movie. Thanks for showing it!
12 years ago
I am ever grateful that you recommended this movie to me four years ago, Pam. I tell all freedom-lovers about this film any chance I get! Thanks again!
