Sodom und Gomorrha (1923)

The 1920s saw two men battling for supremacy of the biblical epic, Cecil B. DeMille and the Hungarian Mihaly Kertesz. DeMille went on to make The Sign of the Cross (1934), Samson and Delilah (1949) and The Ten Commandments (1956) to cement his name as the one that will forever be associated with the genre. Yet whilst Kertesz, who went on to change his name to Michael Curtiz, may ultimately have lost the battle, he's generally acknowledged to have won the war. Once in Hollywood, Curtiz made a string of the greatest films ever made including The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) Mildred Pierce (1946) and, of course, the immortal Casablanca (1942). He got to more than keep his hand in with the historical films as well, most notably his work with Errol Flynn, indeed David Thomson claims that "the Errol Flynn picture was really more Curtiz's invention than the actor's" (Thomson 196).

Of course the move to Hollywood and to Warner's had a major impact on his career - it seems unlikely that his staying with them for around 25 years cannot be solely down to gratitude for them providing him an escape route from the growing Nazi threat. Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder if what really propelled him to greatness was someone sitting him down and telling him to stop making films set several time periods in parallel.

In addition to his early films Boccacio (1919) and Cherchez la femme (1921), three of the four biblical films in which Curtiz was involved, use this differing time periods motif (here, Noah's Ark (1929) and Korda's 1922 Samson und Delila in which the exact extent of Curtiz's involvement is unclear), only Die Sklavenkönigin (The Moon of Israel, 1924) was solely set in the biblical era. What's strange about these three films is that even though the biblical content is only around 50% of the total running time, all three films are named after the biblical characters, perhaps because the lives of the modern characters reflect those of their predecessors.

Whilst this approach had been popular ever since D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), Sodom und Gomorrha is probably the most formal structure.¹ The historic scenes take place within a dream of one of the modern character who first dreams of events in her own time, then of those in Old Testament Sodom, then of events in Syria, before then returning to the dreamlines in Sodom and the modern day,before final awakening for the film's conclusion. Thus the film has a chiastic structure as shown below:

Modern day reality
     →Modern day dream pt.1
          →Biblical dream pt.1
               →Syrian dream (all)
          →Biblical dream pt2.
     →Modern day dream pt.2
Modern day reality


Bizarrely, though, at the heart of this structure is neither the modern story nor the biblical story the film is named after, but the Syrian story. Interestingly this chiastic structure is also emphasised by the film's frequent use of an iris shot. Often these shots are static iris shots, which hold for their duration, rather than an "iris in" or an "iris out". The use of the iris is also a nod to the dream element of the film. In the "real" part of the story the iris acts as a predictor/reminder of the up coming dream sequence. In the dream section of the film it is one of the techniques the filmmakers use to both clarify and remind that this sequence is a dream not a (past) reality.

Of course the film's concentric circles can also extend out one layer further. The darkest area around the iris above is, of course, our real world, now in a fourth time period, but it is this that is true reality, not the film's base layer of reality. And there seems to be an intention, on the surface at least, that this is the kind of film that wants to speak to the viewer at home, too. Throughout the film we have been encouraged to identify with the film's anti-heroine, through a series of visual techniques such as point of view shots and the fact that ultimately we enter her dreams, and when she reconsiders her behaviour in the light of what she has experiences, the film seems to want its audience to do likewise. I didn't really mean to spend as long on that as I have done...and I didn't even get to mention Christopher Nolan's Inception, which works on a very similar chiastic dream premise, though I suspect Nolan hasn't seen Sodom and Gomorrha.

Sodom's other key identification is of the angel with Jesus. Most obviously, before the people of Sodom and Gomorrah try to kill the angel they tie him up, on the top of a hill, in a cruciform position, and ask him "Wenn Du ein Engel bist - Warum schützt Du Dich nicht?" (If you are an angel - why not save yourself?). There are a handful of other minor references applied both to the angel and to the "youth" from the Syrian section.

The film's best visual moment is, as perhaps you might hope, Lot's wife (Lia) turning to a pillar of salt (see above). The biblical section of the film plays fairly loose with its source material. This is partly to align with the modern day story, so Lia is more wanton than ever the Bible suggests, in order to align her with the modern story's anti-heroine. The three leading female roles are all played by (Lucy Doraine). Similarly there is only one angel rather than two so that he can correspond more easily to the modern story's priest (similarly both roles played by Victor Varconi). Lastly Lot and Lia do not have daughters as they do in the biblical story, which, again, enables the film to align Lot's wife with the single woman of the modern story.

The biblical account of Mrs Lot's demise always seems a little harsh. It's one of the places where the judgement of God seems particularly arbitrary and the story seems to be ped(a)lling extra hard to create an explanation. However, whilst here Lia doesn't exactly deserve death, she certainly is no less culpable than her fellow townspeople. In any case, she turns, there's a flash and she is turned instantly to a pillar of salt. The smoke masks the jump-cut, of course, but it's very deftly done and whilst Curtiz's greatest films don't really have a call for this kind of special effect, it demonstrates his ability to masterful execute a powerful visual sequence. It's made all the more effective by the delay between when the intertitle announces what is to happen and the event itself. Fully 3 minutes passes between the announcement of Lia's demise and it actually happening.

As with many of Curtiz's films the sets are impressive - particularly one expressionist shot up a hill to a set of gallows late in the film which is so typical of the best of German films of the time. More typically though, it's the size and scale of the sets, that impresses as well as the scenes of their ultimate destruction. The scenes of crowds of extras fleeing their impending doom hint at what Curtiz would achieve in Robin Hood and in so many of his other swashbuckling films.

Of course, such scenes were no longer novel by this point in the 1920s, but one or two moments, the water in Sodom plopping as sulphur begins to rain down, or the smoke billowing through an Astarte's temple, really stand out. The image quality when viewing the film on YouTube make it difficult to see the detail on the sets. One can only imagine how impressive it would be to see a proper print of the film, in good condition on the big screen.

That said, these scenes, and the film in general, do rather drag and if the film's aim was to get an audience of flappers to reform their behaviour, it seems hard to believe many of them found the harsh, angry priest very appealing. According to Shepherd, the film had spent quite some time in development (217). Given that Curtiz's sense of rhythm, pacing and plot are so perfect in Casablanca, which was still being written as it was being shot, perhaps the problem is that Curtiz had not yet learnt to trust his instincts. Sodom und Gomorrha is notable for the consistency of its structure, but we should be grateful that he would go on to create far better works.
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1 - According to Shepherd there are various cuts of this film including "the DVD produced by the Filmarchiv Austria (2008) [which] does not contain the 'Syrian episode'" and a 1995 reconstruction (218). Whichever version Shepherd is referring to in his general discussion, it does not seem to be the same version as the one available on YouTube which I also acquired on DVD. For one thing Shepherd calls Lot's wife "Sarah" (219)
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- Shepherd, David J. (2013), The Bible on Silent Film: Spectacle, Story and Scripture in the Early Cinema, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Thomson, David (2002) The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, LONDON (Little Brown), Fourth Edition.

The Canon in the Late Silent Era

This is the latest in a series of posts about the relationship between the Bible, the idea of canonicity and film.

The latter part of the silent era saw a distinct change from cinema's early days . Perhaps the most significant change was that films gradually moved from short films - originally less than a minute - to epics of three hours long. By the end of the silent era very few films, relatively speaking, were being made that were less than feature length and the available resources were concentrated on a lower number of longer films, the era became more professional and standardised.

Bible films in this era were no different. The rate of production of films based on the Hebrew Bible, for example dropped from around 6.5 per year prior to the release of Intolerance to 4.5 per year thereafter. There was also a little less diversity. Many of the characters that appeared in the early silent era did not reappear in the latter period - the stories of Athalia, Jael, Ruth, Elisha, Micah, Joshua and Daniel were just some of those that were not remade and overall the range of stories dropped by about a quarter.

At the same time new episodes did get their first airings. In 1918 the German film Hiob became the first film to tell the story of Job. Four years later another German film, Jeremias (1922) broke new ground with the first film about Jeremiah whilst neighbouring Austria saw the creation of Sodom und Gomorrha, directed by Mikhaly Kertesz. Shortly afterwards Kertesz escaped to Hollywood, changed his name to Michael Curtiz and went on to direct some of classic-era Hollywood's most famous films such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Casablanca (1942). One of his first films in America however would be the last "silent" Bible film of note, Noah's Ark (1928) which he directed for Warner. The majority of the film was shot as a silent movie, only for a few extra talking scenes to be added as producers rushed to keep up with the latest technological development.

The other significant change in terms of production was that whereas the early silent era was typified by a handful of directors such as J. Stuart Blackton, Louis Feuillade and Henri Andréani each of whom made a series of Bible films, here most directors only made one film based on scripture. There are obvious exceptions to this like DeMillie and Curtiz/Kertesz who both made a pair of biblical films (DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1923) and The King of Kings (1927); Curtiz/Kertesz' Sodom und Gomorrha (1922) and Noah's Ark (1929)), but the era of a few dedicated directors continually ploughing the same furrow was over.

But other changes were also afoot, firstly character development began to improve. The earliest silents had just presented actors as little more than cinematic nativity figurines, but even by the 1910s even the minor characters were beginning to get developed, 1910's L'Exode, for example, invented and developed the Miller and his family to heartbreaking effect. Intolerance really showcased film's ability to develop a series of characters and get audiences to identify with them even when there were many characters across several stories. This tendency quickly followed in films from the Hebrew Bible and began to gain traction in Jesus movies as well such as Robert Wiene's 1923 I.N.R.I. (Crown of Thorns) where the characters of Judas and Magdalene are also developed.

This tendency to develop the more fringe characters seems to have lent itself to other films developing the same characters and as a result the scenes in which they were prominent began to embed themselves in the canon. For example, even though the gospels never associate Mary Magdalene with the woman caught in adultery from John 8, conflating the two became a common way to boost Magdalene's involvement with the result that this story has a strong position within the New Testament canon.

There's one more thing that is significant about this era that I've not yet touched on and that is the emergence of the big stories that would embed themselves as a key part of the filmic canon from this point onwards. My comments above touch on the breadth of films that were made during this period, but the height of the different films is also significant. It was, after all, in this era that we began to see the emergence of the big Bible film - those films that involved a significant investment and provided the necessary spectacle that would come to be synonymous with the genre.

When we look at some of the "biggest" Bible films of the era, and their corresponding stories certain things begin to emerge:

Sodom und Gomorrha (1922) - Lot
Samson und Delilah (1922, pictured) - Samson
The Shepherd King (1923) - David
The Ten Commandments (1923) - Moses
The King of Kings (1923) - Jesus
Noah's Ark (1929) - Noah

There are two points to note here. Firstly, that all of these films would get a big screen Hollywood remake of sorts in the period between 1949 and 1969. In four cases they used the exact title. The most tenuous claim here is the story of Noah which formed a/the key component of Huston's The Bible (1966). The point could also be made that five of the six stories have also received relatively recent big screen Hollywood adaptations, albeit with a divergence of styles (The Prince of Egypt and Year One for example).

The other point is the flipside of this, that what might be thought of as important stories which didn't get a major adaption during this era (e.g. Adam and Eve, Abraham, Joseph, Joshua, Gideon, Daniel, Judith) tended to be those that have lacked a subsequent big screen Hollywood adaption. There's a certain amount of cherry picking here - Solomon was covered in 1959, Esther in 1960 and Adam and Eve/Abraham were also part of Huston's The Bible, but generally the trend holds out.

All of which raises the question of why this was. Was it that knowing these films had been successful in the past allowed producers a certain comfort that these were the stories that would do well? Was it that there was a sense of nostalgia that even the filmmakers felt themselves or, at least, felt their audiences would feel? Or was it that these were the stories most suited to the big screen where the elements of size and spectacle and/or miracle are the most apt to be captured in the big "Hollywood" blockbuster?

Bible Films that Never Were

Cecil B. DeMille's name will forever be associated with the biblical epic even though he only ever made three and a half films based on the Bible - his two versions of The Ten Commandments (1923¹ and 1956), his Jesus film The King of Kings and 1949's Samson and Delilah. Indeed, given that Samson and the second Ten Commandments were two of the last three movies he ever made , it's a reputation he might never have earned at all. True, there were a number of other ancient epics in his seventy-film canon, but it was those last two films in particular, that cemented his place in the popular imagination as the man that made biblical epics.

However, I've been reading Robert S. Birchard's "Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood" recently, and one of the appendices lists the veteran director's unrealised projects. Given the vast number of movies he made, it's surprising that there are only twelve sucfilms, but it's interesting that four of them are Bible films.

The first of these is The Deluge which I discussed last year. DeMille was considering making the film in the late 20s, but when it became apparent that Michael Curtiz was already making Noah's Ark he switched his attention to The King of Kings instead. Aspiring filmmakers considering adapting the story of Noah take note.

The second film on Birchard's list was Esther (or The Story of Esther) and he notes that MacKinlay Cantour was working on this in the summer of 1934². Birchard doesn't say anymore, but given that this was the same year that DeMille directed Cleopatra, my guess is that he ultimately decided he could only handle one heroine-driven ancient epic at a time.

There's a good deal more information on Queen of Queens, DeMille's planned story of Jesus's mother, (though it's hard to believe that such a title would ever have been taken seriously).

Jeanie Macpherson worked on the script from November 20, 1939 to July 27, 1940. William C. DeMille also worked on the script from March 4, 1940 to June 7, 1941, and William Cowan wrote on the project from September 3 to October 9, 1940. Queen of Queens met some resistance from the Catholic Church , and the film was never scheduled for production.³

Lastly, Birchard tell us that Macpherson also started work on a script for the story of King David, Thou Art the Man.⁴ This was six years before David and Bathsheba reached the screen with its take on David's adultery, so it seems unlikely that once again DeMille had been put off by a similar project at another studio. Perhaps, given his long-standing desire to bring Samson's story to the screen he decided to focus on that instead.

Aside from the list of DeMille's films-that-never-were, I was also interested to read that Steve Reeves and Cary Grant had both been considered for the leading role in Samson and Delilah. Reeves is not in the least surprising, given that he went on to play Hercules and Goliath, but it's incredible to think that any kind of consideration was ever given to Grant. Of course, the whole point of the Samson and Delilah story is that the source of Samson's strength isn't obvious. So it wouldn't have been inconceivable for Grant to play him, but when you look at the final film, and it's emphasis on, and love for, Mature's oiled torso, it's hard to imagine Grant in that same role.

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On a not unrelated note, Eric David of Christianity Today has written a short piece on French director Robert Bresson which claims that he was initially approached to direct Dino de Laurentiis' The Bible: In The Beginning.

In the mid 1960s, Dino de Laurentiis planned a series of films based on the Bible, featuring top directors of the day, including Huston, Visconti, Welles and Fellini. When Bresson, slated to direct Genesis, told de Laurentiis that he planned to film it in Hebrew and Aramaic, and wouldn't show any animals on Noah's Ark, only their footprints in the sand, he was fired. Huston took over and The Bible: In The Beginning, was released, but did not perform well enough to justify the other directors helming their respective films. Bresson yearned to film Genesis the rest of his life, but it never came to pass.

That would certainly have made for a very different film, but given that Bresson instead went on to direct his masterful Christ-figure film Au hasard Balthazar that same year, and that Huston's version has so much to commend it, it may well have all been for the best.

DeMille's Collaborations Redux

I've mentioned the great Cecil B. DeMille in two posts recently, and I've done a bit of searching on them so I thought I'd refer back.

The first was regarding Michael Curtiz. Peter Chattaway noted some similarities between Curtiz's Noah's Ark (1928) and DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1923). When I was preparing to write my review of Noah's Ark I came across some more information which suggested that the influence could have worked in both directions.

Yesterday I was flicking through the the substantial liner notes for the Criterion Collection's release of DeMille's 1927 The King of Kings when I noticed some information regarding Noah's Ark. It seems DeMille was due to work on a similar project about Noah in 1926 called The Deluge, but the plug was pulled when DeMille got wind of Curtiz's project. This shows the two were at least partially aware of each other's work, and that execs then preferred to stop making a film if it was too similar to another (rather than go head to head as often happens today).

Interestingly neither DeMille's autobiography, nor Charles Higham's biography mention Curtiz at all (at least, not in their indicies).

Which leads me nicely onto the second post about DeMille to which I want to return. Last week I commented on a piece in the The Villages Daily Sun newspaper which claimed that DeMille made films with Edgar J. Banks (dubbed the original Indiana Jones). As with Curtiz there's no mention of Banks in the autobiography and Higham's book.

I also (finally!) got hold of Henry S. Noerdlinger's book "Moses and Egypt: The Documentation to the Motion Picture the Ten Commandments" about the 1956 DeMille film. Again, despite the depth of information produced in this book, there's no mention of Banks. Admittedly, DeMille's later version of this film was not released until 10 years after Bank's death, but if DeMille and Banks really were working on films together it's strange that nothing Banks achieved merited a mention in Noerdlinger's book.

That's not, at all, to say the story is a hoax, simply that if it is true it was one very well kept secret.

I'll end on a trivia piece. DeMille made bible films with Banks, who was the inspiration for the Indiana Jones films made by Steven Spielberg, who also directed Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which included a clip from the 1956 Ten Commandments - a bible film directed by DeMille. I hope those people who love making these kind of links appreciate that one. I wonder if DeMille ever pondered making a film about Banks?

Noah's Ark (1928) - Review

Noah's Ark came at the end of two distinctly different eras in the cinema. Firstly the age of the silent movie was drawing to a close. The Jazz Singer had opened everyone's eyes to the potential of talking pictures and both cinemas and studios alike were making the necessary changes to take advantage of the new technology.

In the meantime studios were stuck with the problem of what to do with half finished films which had been, thus far, shot as silents, but risked being seen as outmoded unless drastic action was taken. The solution that many studios took was to complete some of the remaining scenes with sound so that the films were part silent but also part talking. Hitchcock's The Lodger, where only the opening sequence is silent, is one famous example, particularly because it's so innovative with its use of sound.

In Noah's Ark, however, sound occurs more haphazardly. Characters talk, but then go back to miming again moments later. The soundtrack takes advantage of the new technology more effectively using sound effects to complement the action to good effect.

It was also the end of the first golden age of the biblical epic, which, despite the popularity of bible based films since the dawn of cinema, had peaked during the 1920s. The director of Noah's Ark, Michael Curtiz, had already made his name with a string of biblical films including Sodom und Gomorrah, Samson und Delila¹ (both 1922) and Die Sklavenkönigin (The Moon of Israel - 1924). The following year DeMille's The Ten Commandments had been a huge success and the great showman has followed it up four years later with his version of the life of Jesus in The King of Kings.

DeMille's movies, as well as others such as Ben Hur (1925) set new benchmarks for production scale, and Noah's Ark certainly follows suit. The size of some of the sets, and the impressive special effects are truly awesome. The scenes of the flood, complete with a storm and torrents of water appearing from nowhere, are truly impressive. Tragically the quest for drama went too far and several extras were drowned during the filming of these scenes.

The problem with the ever-growing spectacle of the biblical epics was that the depression was just around the corner - something that, bizarrely, this film seems to predict. The combination of reduced cash flow, and the birth of the Hays Production Code brought the end to the first golden age of the biblical epic. The trend would not really get going again until the 1950s. By then Curtiz had moved into more film making including now classic films such as Casablanca and White Christmas.

It's actually the modern story which is overarching in this film. Whilst there is a brief prologue which features footage of Noah, a statue of Jesus and a montage of stock market clips, the story proper starts in 1914. In the first of the film's three catastrophes, a train carrying the major characters crashes and a young, blond German girl (Mary) is pulled from the wreckage by buddies Travis and Al. Travis and Mary fall instantly in love, but their relationship is threatened by the outbreak of the first world war and a Russian spy who had also been aboard the train. Despite getting married the couple are separated due to the war, and are not reunited until Mary finds herself in front of Travis' firing squad. An explosion intervenes and leaves the couple trapped by the rubble along with an old preacher who tells them the story of Noah.

This then forms the context for the Noah story. The actors from the first part of the film take similar roles in the Noah story (à la The Wizard of Oz): so Noah is played by the same actor as the old preacher; Travis and Al pair up with Japheth and Ham; Mary doubles as Japheth's sweetheart, Miriam; and the Russian spy is the evil, idol-worshipping King Nephilim. The minor actors also double up in a similar fashion.

However, the story of Noah is just a pretext for a re-run of the Travis-Mary story. Miriam is chosen at random to be sacrificed to King Nephilim's God Jaguth. When Japheth comes to her rescue he is enslaved only to be freed by the arrival of the flood. Once the pair are safely aboard the ark, the script reverts, almost immediately, to the end of the modern story.

It's difficult to know quite how much Curtiz was influenced by DeMille and vice versa. Around the early 1920s both men borrowed D.W. Griffith's idea of paralleling a biblical story with a modern melodrama. Curtiz's Sodom und Gomorrah and Samson und Delila seem to have come out slightly before DeMille's The Ten Commandments, but Curtiz's Moses film
Die Sklavenkönigin (The Moon of Israel) definitely came out afterwards. But given the time taken to film such large scale films, and that the two men were working in different continents at the time it's certainly possible that the two were almost completely unaware of what the other was doing.

What is clear, however, is the way in which Curtiz draws on aspects of all three of these previous films in making Noah's Ark. There are a myriad of visual and textual references to other biblical stories, especially those he had already filmed, as well as some to the story of Jesus. So there are people crushed under golden calves, climbing up mountains, burning bushes, lightning writing on tablets, people being blinded and forced to drive a mill, falling temples, water falling lava like from above engulfing those in its path, stabbings in the side, references to Golgotha, and words taken from the Lord's prayer.

Unfortunately, in the midst of all these biblical references the actual story of Noah is lost. The old preacher's story gets so taken up in pagan temples, dramatic floods, and the love between the protagonists that it's unlikely it helped those he'd sought to illuminate. The film never gets behind the character of Noah and has precious little to say about the events that occurred once everyone was on board.

It's a shame because some of the film's sequences are incredibly well executed. In particular the scene where the animals rush towards the ark, capturing the urgency and the chaos of the scene is masterful. DeMille would have shown animals marching in in precise double file. Here Curtiz is more than happy to adhere a little more loosely to a literal reading. This makes the scene far more natural and realistic, as well as putting it in line with idea of the animals being sent by God rather than gathered by Noah.

Unfortunately the film's weakness detract from such merits. The modern story is mediocre and overly melodramatic, whereas the Noah episode gets lost in its own technical proficiency. It was the last time Curtiz made a biblical epic, and the last time a film solely about Noah made it onto the silver screen.

1 - The extent to which Curtiz was involved in Samson und Delila is unclear some sources list him as only the costume designer, whereas others list him as supervising director and credit him with the film's success.