Exodus

TCM's Monday night lineup is a bunch of Paul Newman movies. Well, not that big of a bunch since some of the movies have long running times. But I've got a movie airing elsewhere early Tuesday that's going to be the subject of tomorrow's post, so I'm posting about a Monday night movie a bit early. That movie is Exodus, at 10:30 PM Monday.

It's 1947 in Cyprus, and Kitty Fremont (Eva Marie Saint) is a widowed nurse visiting as a sort of respite from traveling around the world and ministering to people affected by the war. If you know your history, Cyprus was a British protectorate at the time. General Sutherland (Ralph Richardson) is one of the commanders of the British military garrison. This was also the time when Jews who had survived the Holocaust and were refugees were trying to get to Palestine, still under the British mandate. The British were trying to prevent them from getting to Palestine and screwing up the demographic situation; when they intercepted a ship carrying Jews they brought the Jews to Cyprus.

Ari Ben Canaan (Paul Newman) is the son of Barak Ben Canaan (Lee J. Cobb) who had emigrated to Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century. Barak made a life for himself as a farmer, but Ari has decided to join the Haganah, a group of freedom fighters who are not quite as violent as the Irgun or the Stern Gang, who were the Jewish groups more likely to cross the line into terrorism. There's a big UN vote coming up on whether to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, and Ari wants to make certain that the UN will vote for partition.

With that in mind, he shows up on Cyprus with a daring plan. A ship called the Star of David has recently been intercepted, with 611 Jews on board. Ari and his confidants intend to break those 611 Jews out of the refugee camp and get them on board a ship that will break the British blockade of Palestine. One of those is a teenager named Karen (Jill Haworth), who had been smuggled out to Denmark where she lived with a Christian family. She hopes to go to Palestine in the hopes that her father is there She also has a boyfriend in Dov Landau (Sal Mineo) who survived Auschwitz.

Meanwhile, Kitty, having seen the conditions under which the Jewish refugees are living, has decided that she's going to spend the rest of her "vacation" tending to the people in the refugee camp who are clearly in need of more medical care than the limited number of doctors and nurses there can provide. This is how she meets both Karen and Ari, and decides that she's going to bring Karen to America with her if she can get the paperwork done; perhaps she'll later adopt Karen. So Kitty might not be so happy at first when she learns that Ari is planning to bring Karen to Palestine.

Eventually, Ari gets all the Jews on a boat, but the British find out and blockade the harbor, to which the Jews respond by throwing all their food overboard and going on a hunger strike. Kitty, being a Christian, is the only one who's able to get on and off the boat, and by now is beginning to develop some sympathy for the Jews, helping to get the British to relent and let the ship go to Israel.

But that's not the end of the movie, not by a long shot. There's still the independence drive, which isn't going to be easy. Karen and the other kids are taken to a kibbutz not too far from where Barak Ben Canaan lives. Their land was deeded to them by a local Arab leader, Taha (John Derek), who believes in living in harmony with the Jews. But of course, with partition, that's simply not going to be possible. Dov wants to join the Irgun, claiming to be an explosives expert. And Kitty finds herself falling in love with Ari -- and the future is mutual -- even though their differences cause all sorts of difficulties.

The Irgun carries out terrorist attacks, most notably the bombing of the King David Hotel. But as we know from history, the UN does eventually vote in favor of partition, and the two sides try to get as much territory on the ground so that the UN will be forced to give them more under the de facto partition. The Arabs attack, but the Jews had been defending themselves, and to be fair, both sides were going to want as much of their territory to be contiguous as possible,something that wasn't going to happen at all with the UN partition plan.

As far as I understand it, Exodus gets the big outline of history correct, although once it delves into putting fictional characters into the flow of history, it's going to get things less than correct due to the need for narrative tension. The narrative mostly works here, anchored by strong performances from Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint

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If there's a problem, it's that the movie runs 208 minutes, and that's with the intermission stripped out. At least, the last time TCM ran it, there technically was an intermission card, but that ran about 10 seconds, and was well over halfway through the movie, and well into the Israel part of the movie. Quite a few of the characters are only in one of the two story lines, which don't get an equal amount of time. I can't help but think the screenwriters should have come up with a way to make two movies out of this, one dealing with the ship blockade (and flesh that one out to just under two hours), with a second movie dealing with the struggle for Israeli independence -- the story is wrapped up too quickly even for a movie running three and a half hours.

Still, if you haven't seen Exodus before, it's certainly worth a watch, in no small part as a document of how academic and cultural elites still viewed Israel favorably before the revolutions of 1968 led to a complete sea-change in elites' opinions.