The Prodigal

There are movies that I'd see show up on TCM every so often but never got around to watching. Another such movie was the 1950s MGM biblical film The Prodigal, so the last time it showed up on TCM I recorded it in order to be able to watch it and do a review here.

The movie starts off with a voiceover about the ancient era being a time when very few people believed in only one God, as though that were the most natural and correct thing to do, with the only people doing that being the believers in Jehovah. We are then told that the action takes place in 70 BC in the seaport of Joppa (modern-day Jaffa, part of Tel Aviv in Israel), and is based on the New Testament parable of the prodigal son. Micah (Edmund Purdom) is a Jew living in Joppa, when he runs across a man named Rhakim (Neville Brand) chasing after a runaway slave.

Micah then returns to his father Eli, who informs him that Eli has set up an arranged marriage for Micah to young Ruth (Audrey Dalton). Micah isn't overly happy about this, since he barely knows Ruth, and is one of those people who apparently believes in the radical idea of marrying for love. And as you might be able to guess from the parable, Micah is going to have the opportunity to do just such a thing.

Micah runs into Rhakim again, this time with a group of people from Damascus who all believe in the false-to-Jews gods of Baal and Astarte. Micah doesn't believe in such gods, at least not until he espies Samarra (Lana Turner) doing her devoitional duties to Astarte. Who wouldn't love someone as good looking as Lana Turner, even if she looks ridiculously out of place as a priestess in the middle east? Micah decides right then and there he's going to have Samarra for himself, even though Mahreeb (Louis Calhern), the high priest in charge of worship of Baal, tells Micah that there's no way Jews can get a priestess like Samarra.

Micah, like so many other men, is now thinking with his wrong head, and he's insistent to his father that he's going to go after Samarra, despite this being a series violation of the first commandment that thou shalt have no other gods before Jehovah. Micah doesn't care, and insists that Eli give him his share of the family wealth so that he may go off to Damascus to pursue Samarra.

Now, this is a reworking of the parable of the prodigal son, so we know that Micah is eventually going to return home having realized how wrong he was, and that Dad is going to accept him again. But at this point we're only about a quarter of the way into the movie, and have 80-some minutes left to go for poor Micah to learn his lesson. And boy is Micah going to have to go through a lot in Damascaus to learn the error of his ways.

I remember many years back, when TCM had one of its first "gay images on film" series, that guest presenter Richard Barrios discussed the film The Sign of the Cross. One of his assertions was that director Cecil B. DeMille wanted to show Christian virtue triumphing over Roman vice, and the way to do that was to put as much Roman vice on the screen as possible. The fact that audiences would go for the vice was a plus. Granted, that was in 1932, before the stricture of the Production Code.

Here, we get the MGM version of blasphemy and idol worship, which probably even in the pre-Code era would have been toned down from what The Sign of the Cross gave us. It feels too sanitized, like MGM getting any number of other genre movies slightly off (a trend I think I first mentioned in Johnny Eager). It also doesn't help that Lana Turner is way mis-cast here, while Purdom doesn't have the greatest screen presence out there.

As always, though, it's worth watching a movie like The Prodigal to see just what goes wrong.

Solomon and Sheba

One of those movies that has a bit of a reputation because of the backstory is Solomon and Sheba, the reason being that actor Tyrone Power suffered a fatal heart attack on the set of the movie. Filming went ahead without him, but before now I'd never actually seen the finished product. When I noticed that it was on Tubi, I decided to watch and see what the final result actually was.

Tyrone Power was cast to play biblical King Solomon, and had actually done quite a fair bit of the movie at the time of his death, so he was replaced by Yul Brynner and all of his close-up scenes reshot. Solomon, for those who don't know this portion of the Bible that well, was the son of King David (Finlay Currie) who, at the time the movie opens, is elderly and has two sons. Solomon is the younger which means that he probably shouldn't inherit the throne, that normally going to the eldest son Adonijah (George Sanders). But David is a wise man and realizes that Adonijah would be a disaster which is why he makes it an explicit point to name Solomon the heritor after Adonijah, thinking David has already died, tries to have himself crowned king.

Solomon does a pretty good job with Israel, making it prosperous even though surrounded by enemies that aren't as well to do, something that mirrors the situation today. This makes the Egyptian pharaoh (David Farrar) angry, and he gets all of his allies together to come up with a plan for what to do with Israel. Among those allies is the monarchy of Sheba, led by a queen (Gina Lollobrigida). She's got a brilliant idea, which is that she will use her sex appeal to make Solomon fall in love with her. Israel, you see, is different from all the other countries surrounding it in that it's the only one that's monotheistic and doesn't really do depictions of its one god. Once the Queen of Sheba gets Solomon in her clutches, she'll try to introduce elements of polytheism which will bring God's wrath upon the Israelites.

It's not so much polytheism that brings all sorts of horrors upon the kingdom of Israel so much as it is Solomon's hubris. He's been a good king for the most part, but he's beginning to get a bit full of himself and thinks he's bigger than he is. And he's still got Adonijah close by, as the commander of the army no less, just waiting for the right moment to happen when he can turn on Solomon.

Solomon has by this time already built the first Temple in Jerusalem, but God's wrath leads to the destruction of the temple as well as all sorts of Biblical disasters like famine and drought upon the kingdom. Adonijah sees that this is a good time to get Egypt to attack, and Adonijah will become ruler of a vassal state. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven, as the saying goes. Of course, according to the Bible, Adonijah is not ultimately successful. But if you don't know the complete Biblical story, you'll have to see the movie to see just how Adonijah fails.

Filming for Solomon and Sheba began in 1958, at a time when Biblical epics were all the rage in both Hollywood and Europe, which makes this story one that you can see why someone would want to make a big production out of. And there's some good stuff here, mostly in the cinematography. Unfortunately, as we all know, Tyrone Power died, which necessitated not just all those reshoots, but apparently rewrites for Yul Brynner as well. Whether the script doctoring or the general atmosphere of having to complete a troubled production is what brings the movie down, I'm not certain. But there really is something here that doesn't feel quite right.

Having said that, I really think that even moreso than with other pictures I don't like, Solomon and Sheba is one where you need to watch it for yourself and draw your own conclusions as to what went wrong.

Ruth's Story

One of the movies that's been in the FXM rotation for the last few months that I hadn't blogged about before is the biblical movie The Story of Ruth. So I recorded it, and since it's got a couple of airings coming up starting with tomorrow (May 17) at 12:45 PM, I made a point of sitting down now to watch it to be able to do a review on it here.

The movie is based in part on the Old Testament book of Ruth (played here by newcomer Elana Eden). I didn't know much of the details of that book of the Bible, and reading through the synopses, it seems that much of the first half of the movie is giving Ruth a backstory that's not in the Bible. Ruth is a young girl in Moab, a non-Jewish civilization, who is being raised to become a priestess and possibly a human sacrifice, something decidedly non-Jewish. Moab has wound up with some conquered Jews in its population, notably Naomi (Peggy Wood) and her sons Mahlon (Tom Tryon) and Chilion. Mahlon has grown up to become a stonemason and, since the Moabite religion worships stone representations of its main god, the king brings in Mahlon to do some work on one of those statues.

This, as you can guess, is how Mahlon meets Ruth. Mahlon starts talking not-so-casually about how the Hebrew conception of God is rather different than what the Moabites believe, and that the Hebrews most certainly don't believe in idols. Ruth seems to like Mahlon, and his talk about religion gets her to thinking, which is a dangerous thing to do since the Hebrew tribes' religion is so different from the Moabites'. Ultimately, when Ruth is supposed to take part in one of the ritual child sacrifices, she's had enough and tries to stop the proceedings, which gets both her and Mahlon in trouble.

At least for Ruth, the king seems to have the hots for her and wants her in the royal household, but for Mahlon it's off to the mines to do some good old-fashions life-shortening slave labor. Ruth, having fallen in love with Mahlon, is a bit dangerous in that she's liable to try to walk out on the king so that she can go free Mahlon. Of course, doing so is going to get her banished from Moab and forcing her to make an escape back to Judea. Never mind that Mahlon gets fatally wounded in the escape attempt. At least he lives long enough to marry Ruth, albeit not long enough to consummate the marriage or impregnate Ruth in a way that would satisfy the Production Code.

So Mahlon dies as his brother did before him, and Naomi is left with two widowed daughters-in-law. Orpah stays behind in Moab while Naomi and Ruth head off to Judea, where they find that life isn't quite so good as it was when they left because the rains haven't been coming as much as they should.

Boaz (Stuart Whitman) is a powerful distant cousin who could help Naomi and Ruth, and even possibly marry Ruth in accordance with Jewish law about the next-of-kin marrying a widow. But there's another man who's an even closer relation to Ruth's late husband, Tob (Jeff Morrow), and he's willing to marry Ruth if only to keep Boaz from marrying her. There's also the issue of Ruth's having been a high priestess back in Moab, and whether that's in violation of any Jewish laws. (It shouldn't be, if the religion believes in sincere conversions, but the question of valid conversions is still a vexing one today, especially in a relatively non-hierarchical religion.)

The Story of Ruth is a surprisingly low-key affair by the standards of the other biblical epics that were being released around this time. It doesn't have the spectacle of movies like King of Kings or Ben-Hur, or the tittilation of something like Joan Collins in Esther and the King. But the modest nature of the movie mostly works, with the exception that the movie runs a bit long. Putting in spectacle helps make a long movie seem not so long, and without that spectacle, a movie like The Story of Ruth really ought to run under two hours instead of the 130 or so minutes we get here.

The other unfortunate thing is that FXM has panned-and-scanned the print down from the Cinemascope ratio (which we get to see for the opening minute and then again briefly at the end) to 16:9. I don't know if there's a full Cinemascope print available.

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.

The King of Kings (1927)

Back on Easter, TCM ran a whole bunch of religious-themed movies. One that I made it a point to put on the DVR since I hadn't done a post on it before is the 1927 silent version of The King of Kings. It's available on a two-disc set from Criterion, so I finally got around to watching it to do a post on it.

The movie starts off with a two-strip Techniolor scene that isn't out of the Bible. Mary Magdalene (Jacqueline Logan) is in the sinning portion of her life, living it up with a bunch of Romans at a party that has a feast and a leopard among other things. She's irritated, however, that her boyfriend Judas Iscariot (Joseph Schildkraut) isn't there. She's informed that Judas has taken up with this carpenter from Nazareth, whom some people are treating as a messiah. So she sets of to find Judas and win her away from the carpenter.

Of course, the carpenter is Jesus (H.B. Warner, who was past 50 when he made this even though Jesus is generally considered to have been in his early to mid 30s when he was crucified). And if you know your Bible stories you'll know that Mary Magdalene winds up falling in with Jesus rather than winning Judas back for herself. As for Judas, you'll recall that his fate is to betray Jesus for 30 pieces of silver.

Anyhow, the Jesus in this movie performs various of the miracles that were depicted in the Bible, with director Cecil B. DeMille using intertitles containing verses from the Gospels, all meticulously cited. (The intertitles for establishing scenes use new material.) Among the miracles are the Lazarus story, healing the afflicted and making the blind see again. Other non-miracle portions of the Bible used are the famous stoning of the adulteress scene, as well as Jesus helping Peter (Ernest Torrence) pay his taxes by catching a fish with a coin in its mouth. DeMille strays from the Bible by having the Romans react by trying to catch fish themselves in the hopes that those fish will similarly have coins in their mouths!

Jesus ultimately makes it to Jerusalem, since that's where he's supposed to be crucified. He finds that the temple has been taken over by a corrupt group of rabbis led by Caiaphas (Joseph Schildkraut's real-life father Rudolph). The Romans, led by Pontious Pilate (Victor Varconi), want to find this meddlesome messiah, and finding him a threat to Roman authority, crucify him, only for Jesus to be resurrected on the third day.

The King of Kings is one of those movies that's a bit more difficult to judge, largely because it's based on material that would be very well-known anywhere in the western world. The movie is very well-made for the most part, although at times it gets close to going over the top. Jesus is presented using lighting that makes him almost glow -- we get the point already, although it's hard to avoid when you've got a character who as the son of God is supposed to be perfect.

The one flaw I found is that the movie really began to drag. There were actually two versions: a general release print that ran about 112 minutes, and a roadshow version that clocks in at about 156 minutes. TCM ran the latter, and I couldn't help but think the story could have been told in the shorter run time. (The Criterion release apparently contains both prints.)

For anybody who has in interest in Biblical movies, I can't see why they wouldn't find this an excellent addition to the genre.

Barabbas

TCM ran a bunch of religious-themed movies on Easter, and I recorded a couple that I hadn't done posts on yet. One of those was Barabbas.

Anthony Quinn stars as Barabbas, a name Christians will recognize from one key scene in the Gospels. Jesus is set to be crucified during Passover, and Roman governor Pontius Pilate (Arthur Kennedy) knows of the old Jewish tradition that during the Passover season, one of the condemned is to be set free. So he offers the Jews a choice: Jesus, or the thief and murderer Barabbas. The crowd chooses to pardon Barabbas, leaving Jesus to be crucified.

Barabbas goes home to his girlfriend Rachel (Silvana Mangano), and her mother Sara (Katy Jurado). They actually believe in Jesus and that he's going to rise again on the third day, something Barabbas thinks is nonsense. And yet, come the third day, Jesus has disappeared from his tomb! Barabbas doesn't know what to think or do.

Unfortunately for him, opinion among the early Christians is sharply divided on how to treat him. There's a lot of ostracism of both him and Rachel, and Rachel eventually gets stoned to death, while Barabbas gets arrested by the Romans. They can't execute him because of the prior pardon, so instead they send him to the sulfur mines in Sicily.

The sulfur mines are a brutal life, as the chemicals are blinding, and the lack of light in the mines will blind them anyway if they come back out to the light. Never mind the back-breaking labor. Somehow, Barabbas is able to survive for ages, much longer than any of the other slaves, and is eventually chained to Sahak (Vittorio Gassman). When he saves Sahak during a mine explosion, he gets his sentence commuted to less back-breaking work farming.

It's there that he meets Julia (Valentina Cortese) and her husband Rufio, the two procuring Barabbas and Sahak and making them gladiators in Rome. There, Barabbas meets many more Christians, who by now seem amazed to meet somebody who was actually in the presence of Jesus. But being a gladiator is tough, and dealing with Torvald (Jack Palance), the best gladiator of them all, isn't going to be easy.

Barabbas is an interesting movie that's not without its flaws. Quinn is quite good as the man who has a pretty severe crisis of faith, which frankly would be understandable if your life was spared so somebody else could be executed. He also has difficulty comprehending how the Christians can still have their faith especially in light of the way the Romans treat them. Palance is good as the villain, looking like he's having loads of fun. Everybody else is adequate, getting their scenes and then departing from the movie since this is all about Barabbas.

The big problem I had with the movie is in part due to its production. Dino de Laurentiis produced, with a multinational cast and filming locations around Italy. Valentina Cortese, when she was in Day for Night a dozen years later, had a line about how Fellini (not the director here, but this is I think indicative of Italian movies) let the actors speak numbers and then do their dialogue in post-production. All of the dialogue here had the distinct feeling of having been done in post, and as such feels really detached from the rest of the movie. For some reason more than a lot of other movies, I found it really jarring here.

Overall, though, Barabbas is certainly worth a watch. It's available on DVD too.

Gospel Road with different music

If you can set the life of Jesus to country-gospel music, you can set it to almost any genre of music. Rock opera shows up tonight on TCM at 8:00 PM with the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar, which is followed by show tunes with Godspell at 10:00 PM.

The framing story is an interesting one. In New York City of the early 1970s (just before Gerald Ford was telling the city to drop dead), a bunch of people are having problems with their personal lives. One by one, each of them sees a bearded man, who through sheer force of personality gets them to go off with him! It's obviously an allegory to Jesus! Er, no it isn't. It's actually John the Baptist, as we see when he takes all of them to a fountain to have them baptized. This, of course, is where Jesus shows up, wanting to be baptized; at this point Jesus becomes the leader of the new group of believers....

In this telling of the story, it's an excuse for "Jesus" and his "apostles" to go around New York retelling the story of Jesus' life, and singing Broadway show tunes set mostly outside in front of suitably impressive backdrops of various locations in New York: Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Bridge, Grant's Tomb, and even one number shot in part on the World Trade Center which was still under construction at the time.

As with Gospel Road, it's a bit difficult to give a rating to a movie like this: it's much less about the story then it is about the music. That having been said, Godspell, I think, winds up quite a bit better than Gospel Road. It's not because I prefer show tunes to Cash's style of music; in fact I'm not that big a fan of Broadway. However, the "apostles" here have an enthusiasm that fits perfectly with the music, and the framing story is much better, effectively making its point about how God is (or should be, depending on your religious beliefs) relevant in modern day life. It's a statement that's particularly well-made at the very end, after the crucifixion of Jesus. (Oh, I didn't give away the story, did I?)

Godspell is not only available on DVD; you can get any of a large number of versions of the soundtrack on CD.

Still he survived

There's a story in the Bible about the King trying to kill all of the Jews' first-born sons so that their infant savior-to-be will never grow up to be their savior. Paul Newman's career could have been nipped in the bud by the disaster that is his first film, The Silver Chalice, which is airing at 6:30 AM tomorrow on TCM.

Newman plays Basil, a Greek silversmith in the first century AD/CE who gets sold into slavery. Along come the Christians, who have just seen the loss of their Messiah. They want a replica in silver of the Holy Grail, the cup from which Jesus was believed to have taken his last drink. So far so good. Along the way, however, Basil finds himself having to deal with two women. The lovely Deborah (Pier Angeli), a Christian and daughter of Joseph of Arimathea, who is clearly supposed to be right for him; and the horrid pagan harlot Helena (Virginia Mayo, who gets top billing).

That's not all Basil and the Christians have to deal with. There are people out there who clearly don't like the idea of Jesus being a messiah, and so they come up with the brilliant plan of having a messiah of their own, one who is still living! They're just making up a messiah, of course, so they need somebody who can pull off the con, and that would be magician Simon (Jack Palance). You know the Christians are going to win, of course, but they way it happens is a bit interesting: Simon actually begins to believe the garbage he's spewing!

There's rather a bit more in this turgid movie. The basic story shouldn't be that bad, but there's a fair amount of miscasting (notably Mayo, and her Helena character as a younger girl, played by Natalie Wood), and mis-direction. We know that Newman would later go on to be quite a good actor; why is he so off here? On the bright side, at least we have Jack Palance to steal the show. If younger viewers remember him today, it's the elderly Palance who had an Oscar-winning role in City Slickers. At the beginning of his career, though, he played villains and heavies, in movies such as Second Chance. Whether it was his idea or the director's, I'm not sure, but Palance goes over the top here and at least makes things somewhat interesting.

Apparently people at the studio must have known that Newman had more potential than he was able to show in this mess. Either that, or he was already at work on his next film. At any rate, The Silver Chalice is one of the worse Biblical movies of the 1950s, which has gained a bit of cult stauts for having screwed up so badly despite its cast. For that alone, it probably deserves one viewing.

So Lent begins tomorrow

At least it does, if you're one of those Christian denominations that takes Lent more than moderately seriously. The Fox Movie Channel has scheduled for the day by having a morning of religious-themed movies, including the Biblical mess David and Bathsheba, tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM ET.

I'll admit that I don't know the Biblical story of David and Bathsheba very well, so I don't know quite how faithful this movie adaptation is to the 3000-year-old story. Gregory Peck stars as David, the King of the Israelites, currently making war against some other tribe, with the help of his military commander Uriah (Kieron Moore). David can't always be at the front, and returns to Jerusalem to do the people's business, as well deal with his wife Michal (Jayne Meadows). She unfortunately is a harpie, constantly hen-pecking David for being born a shepherd, for constantly having an eye for other women, and all sorts of other things. (I guess wives have always been nags.) David, unsurprisingly, turns his attention to other things, most notably the woman he can see bathing when he looks down from his terrace. That woman is Bathsheba (Susan Heyward), and when he invites her to the palace for dinner, they immediately hit it off.

To say that David and Bathsheba hit it off is a bit of an understatement. They almost immediately begin a passionate love affair, even though Bathsheba tells David that she's also Mrs. Uriah. You know that things aren't going to end well from all this, and we get a foreshadowing of this in a scene in which David shows he's lost his mojo with the slingshot. (Viewers may recall that David smote Goliath, something which is shown near the end of the movie.) Things go from bad to worse when Bathsheba informs David that she's gotten knocked up, and that he has to be the father because she hasn't slept with Uriah in months, he being off fighting David's war. David calls Uriah back to Jerusalem and devises a devious plan to get Uriah to sleep with Bathsheba, and -- miracle of miracles -- the one time that Uriah has sex with Bathsheba will be the time that Bathseba gets pregnant. But Uriah is so filled with zeal that he doesn't go home to Bathsheba, which means that David will have to get Uriah killed so that he can marry Bathsheba and the child will be legitimate, having been conceived just in time.

It's at this point that things really go from worse to worst, with the Israelites suffering drought and, presumably, other plagues that don't get shown on screen. David suffers too, as the new kid dies. The prophet Nathan (Raymond Massey) leads a bunch of disgruntled Israelites who are going to force Bathsheba to stand trial for adultery, the penalty for which is stoning (with David being forced to cast the first stone), but David repents just in time and everything turns about reasonably well for the Israelites.

Or so the movie's story goes. As I said at the beginning, there are probably liberties taken here, but since I don't know the Biblical story, I can lok at this more as a straight-up movie. In that way, it's problematic. Every plot turn is just oh-so-convenient, to the point of being laughable. And if the plot turns are laughable, the dialog is even more so. You really have to feel for poor Gregory Peck having to spout these lines. Still, David and Bathsheba is at least entertaining enough for a laugh, and might even be better than that. It's gotten a DVD release too, so you don't have to get up at 6:00 AM to watch it.