GROSS/57 1966 - The Bible - being, not becoming.
You must be thinking "hasn't Steve gone crazy yet, watching all these terrible movies?"
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THE BIBLE: IN THE BEGINNING… Ulla Bergryd, Ava Gardner, George C. Scott; directed by John Huston. 174 minutes. Wikipedia, IMDB, Letterboxd.
The clue is in the name. The Bible: in the Beginning… is a different kind of epic. It doesn’t lift a big moment or a sequence of events from the Christian story and dramatise it. We don’t travel with a bear-chested hero through an implausible expanse of time and space, smiting and declaiming and so on. There are leading characters, of course (Noah, Sarah, Nimrod, Hagar, the snake…) but thre’s no singular hero (does this explain why the picture attracted no Oscars acting nominations at all?). Something splendid about having George C. Scott’s Abraham, humble in sackcloth (or, what is it, hessian, hemp?) drifting around humbly and not Prince Judah Ben-Hur prancing and preening, biceps polished. Seems like a big shift, maybe a mid-sixties, meritocratic shift, something about boomer egalitarianism and impatience with jumped-up authority figures.
So this film doesn’t claim the status of a historical text. It’s not historical in fact; it’s existential - it flows. Things happen in the order specified by the King James version but the whole doesn’t constitute a story. Being not becoming.
Origin story
The literary historians tell us that the historical novel was killed by the horrors of the first world war (and then killed again - only this time properly - by the second). The idea is that it would have been impossible even to imagine a War and Peace or a Les Misérables after all that slaughter. But, of course, historical novels - which begat historical movies - are still here. In fact they’re all around us and they have metamorphosed, absorbing other genres uninhibitedly. But it’s the popular form that survived and thrived, not the lofty one, not the grand, philosophical, century-spanning works of Tolstoy and Hugo but the drug-store and b-picture stuff: all those maritime pot-boilers and Regency bodice-rippers and the biggest historic novel of all time, Gone with the Wind (which became the biggest movie of all time, for a while).
The epics I’ve looked at here so far - Samson, Quo Vadis, Greatest Show on Earth, The Ten Commandments, Kwai, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Lawrence, Cleopatra (Christ, there are a lot of them) - are all historical - even the biblical ones claim historic truth and take the three-act form. So there’s a winning defiance in Huston the cheeky patriarch’s deliberate, slow, episodic mode in this film and in the way each segment blends into the next as if they might have been chapters from the same story - there was the fall and then the flood and then the huge tower and then… Huston fully abandons the storybook logic of the historical novel and the biblical epic and gives us something more modern - a looser, cooler exegesis for the flower-power era.
Exegesis
I wanted to try to bring in some other biblical exegesists here - Dante, Milton. You won’t be surprised that I’ve given up - I’m obliged to acknowledge I don’t know enough about these guys - and especially about how you’d sit a rather gentle, 20th-Century picture-book Old Testament alongside the cruelty and severity of an Inferno or of a Paradise Lost. I’m going to insist there’s a thread of some kind, though. I mean Huston brings us God (literally - he’s literally God) but really only hints at Satan. This is a pity: I’d like to have met Huston’s Prince of Darkness - suspect he’d have been a caution (probably a charming gambler). We get a kind of petulant Nimrod, a weary ‘Oh God, what next?’ Abraham, Sarah is the definition of long-suffering (127 years-suffering, in fact).
Satan’s just the vague presence of most modern Bible stories, though. He ‘tempts’ Eve and it’s infuriating: “why would you allow this, God? You just created these creatures, this whole thing! What are you even doing with this Satan guy?” And Huston is vague, unhelpful. His Fall is ponderous, sometimes comic. Thunder and lightning; carefully placed fronds and so on. The passage is at least twice the length of the bible story and slows almost to a stop in the middle while we wait for God’s judgement (we drum our fingers and go on our mobile phones). Huston himself alternates the voice of God and narrator, sometimes swapping around in the same sentence, confusing us, until we give up and just roll with it.
John Milton v John Huston
I’m not entirely sure why I’m giving all this attention to Huston’s weak account of the first 22 chapters of the Old Testament - this could really have been one of my capsules, right? The movie’s loveable but it’s bland. Walt Disney would have been tougher, weirder - darker, even. If I’d been Dino De Laurentiis I’d have given this one to King Vidor, who was still around, a veteran of the silent era who dramatised great battles between individual and blank, unaccountable power half a dozen times (see his The Big Parade here). Vidor did Howard Roark; he could easily have managed God, Satan, Noah, Abraham and the others.
What we’re desperate for is some grandeur or some arbitrary terror. Audiences, in 1966, knowing Huston’s history of adaptations, might have been expecting something more literary - especially at mid-career with so much behind him. Why did he stick with a straight account of the King James verses? Back to my point: why didn’t he adapt Paradise Lost? It’s honestly upsetting. This is the man who tackled Malcolm Lowry, Carson McCullers, James Joyce FFS. I guess the studio would have run a mile. Milton’s version was also longer than the source but it was forty times longer. Milton’s God was crueler too, setting up his creations for failure and then blaming them and then building a justification for God’s epic condescension on the smoking ruin and then doing it again and again for 10,565 lines of iambic pentameter. John Huston gives us a beautiful, comic Instagram line of zoo animals, paired-up behind him, fluting his way into the Ark.
The other angle I tried but gave up on in writing about The Bible was John Huston vs. the House Un American Activities Committee and the loyalty oath. I think I could have got away with it. I mean it’s biblical (or at least Shakespearean). 15 years before this movie, Huston had assembled an informal committee of movie stars and writers to oppose the blacklist and to take on, of course, his satanic nemesis Cecil B DeMille. I think I’d have found enough in Huston’s war with the greatest maker of the greatest epics over the actual constitution of the actual Republic of the United States for this post but I dropped it - because ultimately Huston, in that battle, was less of a republican warrior (less of a Milton) than a pragmatic businessman, like them all. When it came to it he retreated and gave McCarthy and Hoover and the rest of those rats what they wanted so that he’d be allowed to go on making his movies. Too sad, really. The story is amazing, though (and should be a movie).
Guess what: in 2012 Bradley Cooper was set to play Lucifer in a live action Paradise Lost, sadly abandoned: “To me it’s a very small story… about two brothers and their father and what happens when one son feels utterly betrayed…”
The historical dramas I’ve reviewed here so far: The Birth of a Nation, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Covered Wagon, The Sea Hawk, The Big Parade, Napoléon, The Jazz Singer, Shanghai Express, It Happened One Night, Mutiny on the Bounty, Gone with the Wind, Sergeant York, Forever Amber, The Greatest Show on Earth, Brief Encounter, The Apprentice, The Bridge on the River Kwai, South Pacific, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Lawrence of Arabia, Cleopatra, The Sound of Music.
Of course once I’d noticed that ‘John Huston’ was only one sylable - three letters - from ‘John Milton’, once I’d realised they were both patriarchs and republicans and both big fans of divorce. Both - at least in this moment - biblical exegesists, of course I wanted to connect them. I think I ought to write another post about these connections.
The other form of historical novel that has persisted is the post-modern kind - the counterfactual, the imagined dictator, the layered sci-fi labyrinth and so on. There’s a brilliant, mind-expanding essay at the back of Perry Anderson’s Different Speeds, Same Furies about this.