Please forgive us for today’s late start. We stayed up waaay too late last night torturing ouselves with the film version of Exodus, based on Leon Uris’ classic novel about the birth of modern Israel. We figured this story, fraught with romance, intrigue and Jewish history, would translate into a hugely entertaining evening in front of the tube, but alas, the three hour-plus epic was so g.d. boring we fell asleep three times. Our sofa partner kept moaning “Let my people go, already!”
Let’s examine how a movie starring a young, handsome Paul Newman as freedom fighter Ari Ben Canaan, set in the Old City with breathtaking views, could have more of a narcotic effect than a vat of Oxycontin: Eva St. Marie, as the strong-willed shixsa nurse Kitty Fremont, comes across onscreen as more of a skeletal June Cleaver with the sexual chemistry of a napkin. Tough ghetto survivor Dov Landau is played by Sal Mineo, best known for his homoerotic tragic hero, Plato, opposite James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause, but he just seems like he should be singing show tunes rather than carrying a machine gun. Even Newman’s performance seems wooden. The fact that the scriptwriters only glanced upon the most exciting moments in the book, like the suspenseful chapter where the United Nations votes on Israel, and completely deleted the scene where Kitty performs surgery without anesthesia on Ari, only confirms one of our holiest personal truths: The book is ALWAYS better than the movie.
So we’re sticking to literature this New Year. On our nightstand now: Jewish author Marge Piercy‘s latest novel, The Third Child. God willing, Hollywood will never get its hands on it.