Cast a Giant Shadow

I noticed that Cast a Giant Shadow is available on DVD, so I finally got around to watching it off my DVR to do a full-length post on it here.

Kirk Douglas plays David "Mickey" Marcus, who at the start of the movie is a lawyer living in New York and shopping in Macy's at Christmas 1947. He's actually Jewish, at least by birth; he says he hasn't been to temple since his bar mitzvah. Anyhow, he's being followed through Macy's for a reason we'll soon learn. The man following him is Major Safir (James Donald), a representative from the would-be Israeli army. Israel wasn't an independent state yet, but the United Nations had already decided that the British mandate over Palestine was going to end in May 1948 and there would be a partition of the region, giving the Jews a state of their own, even if the planned territory was tiny and not at all contiguous. However, the nascent government knows that as soon as the British mandate ends, the various Arab armies are going to attack and try to take over the whole of Palestine, pushing the Jews who knows where.

They need military help, and it turns out that Marcus was a colonel in the US Army during World War II. Plus, he wrote a bunch of training manuals, so he'd be just the right person to provide the technical support the various Israeli military factions -- who aren't particularly united themselves -- desperately need. So they'd like Marcus to come over to Israel and provide them that support. Marcus isn't so certain he wants to do it, in part because he's got a wife Emma (Angie Dickinson) in New York, but eventually he does decide to take an advisory position.

It turns out that the Israelis really do need help. They're badly underarmed, and undermanned, ultimately being forced into using whatever refugees they can smuggle in (think Exodus) to do work and if possible fight despite the fact that they've had no training. Commander Asher (Yul Brynner) does ultimately respect Marcus, although he also knows that Marcus has no real knowledge of the situation on the ground in Palestine and is almost naïve about it. The two are often at loggerheads over both tactics and strategy. But the Defense Minister standing in for David Ben-Gurion (quite a few names were changed although a fair amount of the story is as it happened; the minister renamed Zion is played by Luther Adler) consistently tries to convince Marcus to stay on. And Marcus is provided with a love interest in the form of Magda (Senta Berger).

Eventually we get to the Israeli declaration of independence, and the action picks up with the Arabs predictably declaring war against the Jews. There are a bunch of Jews in Jerusalem, but they're cut off because the Arabs own all the land around the city and control the high points overlooking the one road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Until, that is, a Bedouin leader (Topol) reminds everybody of a wadi that could be the starting point for a road around the Arab positions. Building that road, however, is going to be a big challenge. And they have to get it done before the cease fire and positions are frozen; without that the Jews can't claim any part of Jerusalem.

Cast a Giant Shadow is a well-made movie that tells an interesting story, but there's something about it that has a rather perfunctory feel about it. There's a lot that feels contrived, especially regarding the two female leads. Magda is apparently the one character who was closest to being made up from whole cloth to make a more palatable movie, while Emma is generally an afterthought. There are also a couple of weird cameos. Yul Brynner is listed at the end of the cast in the closing credits as one of those cameos although he's quite good and very necessary to the plot. The other two are John Wayne as a stand-in for General Patton (Patton was Marcus' commander, but had died before the action in the story), and Frank Sinatra as a pilot who actually winds up taking part in the battle by creating fake explosions. Couldn't they have gotten Jewish Rat Packer Sammy Davis at least? Pluses besides Brynner are Luther Adler; Kirk Douglas to a lesser extent; and the cinematography to a greater extent.

Overall, I think Cast a Giant Shadow is a movie it's certainly good to have seen once, but one that I don't think I'm going to be watching multiple times.