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.