Even among hardcore cineastes, interest in or even awareness of Otto Preminger‘s Exodus (’60) is minimal. A 208-minute historical drama about the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, Exodus is a sluggishly paced if decently made film, handsomely shot in widescreen 70mm color by Sam Levitt (The Defiant Ones, Anatomy of a Murder, Pork Chop Hill) and efficiently performed by Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Ralph Richardson, Peter Lawford, Sal Mineo, Jill Haworth, Lee J. Cobb, et. al.
Preminger’s decision to hire and openly credit the formerly blackballed Dalton Trumbo as the sole Exodus screenwriter did a lot to end the Hollywood blacklist era of the ’50s. Kirk Douglas‘s Spartacus, which opened two months before Exodus in early October, has also been credited with doing the same. The Spartacus-Exodus one-two punch.
What act of future public bravery, I wonder, will end the scourge of wokester terror that we’re all living under today?
60 years on, there’s only one remnant of Preminger’s film that has lingered into the 21st Century, and that’s Saul Bass‘s Exodus logo — that image alone has held on and persisted. Nobody remembers the film, but everyone knows that image of armed rebellion and revolution.
