Sodom and Gomorrah

I've got several movies to blog about that are all coming up on TV within a relatively close timeframe, so I'm blogging about the first of them a bit earlier than normal. Sodom and Gomorrah recently started showing up in the FXM rotation, so I recorded it for a future airing. The next airing is on early Tuesday morning, at 3:20 AM, so now's the time to blog about it.

Sometime after Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt and they wandered in the desert for 40 years, they split up into smaller groups in search of better land to plant down roots. One of the groups is led by Lot (Stewart Granger), and has some dissension in its ranks in the form of Melchior (Rik Battaglia); fter all, who wants to be wandering around the desert like this? Eventually they find a river and think this is a good place to settle down.

However, the site Lot picks is more or less just across the river from the city of Sodom, which is ruled by Queen Bera (Anouk Aimée). She's got a brother Astaroth (Stanley Baker) who has been plotting to depose his sister with some help from the nomadic Elamites. Sodom is a wealthy city thanks to the presence of copious amounts of salt, which is mined with heavy use of slaves. Having the Hebrews around is going to screw things up in many ways.

One is that the Hebrews are extremely pious and virtuous, even though the Sodomites don't believe in the god Jehovah that the Hebrews worship. They explicitly oppose slavery, while saying they'll give sanctuary to any slaves who escape from Sodom and cross the river. There's also the fact that Lot and Bera are eventually able to come to an agreement on how much to pay for the land on which the Hebrews settle. Astaroth is going to have to get the Elamites to destroy the Hebrews too.

But first, Astaroth lets one of the slaves, Ildith (Pier Angeli), stay over on the Hebrew side in the hopes that she'll serve as a spy for him. Instead, she eventually falls in love with Lot and becomes his wife. One of Lot's daughters, Maleb (Claudie Mori), marries Lot's second-in-command Ishmael (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart), while the other one, Shuah (Rossana Podestà) is taken back to Sodom by Astaroth.

As for that contract to pay for the land, Lot does what the stereotype of clever Jews exiled to infertile ghettos has Jews do: use their brains to figure out a different way to make money and become wildly rich. In this case, that means damming the river and making the Hebrews' side of the river incredibly fertile. They'll also wind up with an even bigger salt deposit than the Sodomite side.

But Astaroth has those Elamites come and attack; they burn down the Hebrews' camp and destroy the crops, while the only way to defeat the Elamites is to destroy the dam and drown them. It makes Lot and the Hebrews heroes in the eyes of Bera, but it also means that the Hebrews, having no place to live, have to move into Sodom. Big mistake.

The Hebrews grow fat and happy in the temporal world, while Jehovah is getting increasingly pissed off at them and of course doesn't care for the debauched Sodomites. Lot defeats Astaroth in hand to hand combat that results in Astaroth's death, only afterwards realizing that Bera wanted this so she could get rid of her enemy. Lot is sentenced to death, but Jehovah sends a couple of angels to offer the Hebrews deliverance, as long as none of them look back at Sodom while Jehovah is smiting the city. You probably know what happens.Sodom and Gomorrah was one of those international epic co-productions that dotted the landscape in the years either side of 1960, this one involving the French, Italians, and Americans; much of the filming was done in Morocco. It wound up with a bloated budget thanks to cost overruns, but has the feel of a lower budget epic, which is of course to the film's detriment. The dialogue is risible, although to be fair, with people from so many nationalities, much of it was not in people's native languages if not just done in post-production.

The effects don't quite work either, which for a movie about the destruction of a city, is a bit of a problem. The battle with the Elamites really looks like obvious miniatures; I'm reminded of when TCM did a spotlight on MGM's effects guy and the modern day effects people brought in to talk about the movie pointed out that you can't miniaturize drops of water. That's especially obvious here. And then in the climax, when Sodom is getting destroyed, everybody simply looks like they're staggering around drunkenly while the camera is shaking.

Still, Sodom and Gomorrah is definitely worth one watch, with fans of sword-and-sandle movies and the epics of the era probably being most likely to enjoy it. For the rest of us, it's more likely to be finding it unintentionally humorous at times. The movie also desperately needs a restoration, based on the print FXM ran. (I thought at first it was panned-and-scanned down to 16:9, but IMDb says the movie was filmed in 1.85:1.)

Sodom and Gomorrah has gotten a standalone DVD release courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme. It's also on a box set with three other disparate religion themed movies.