This late entry in the Cinerama Biblical epic cycle seems at first an unlikely choice for King Vidor's directorial swan song -- after all, the constant flux of forces against which his protagonists have struggled since the silent days has usually been more volcanically elemental than divinely determined. Hardly the proper summation for a great director's career, the film, like Vidor's previous War and Peace adaptation (which has less to do with Tolstoy than with a twilight reflection on the themes of The Big Parade), is studded with small personal statements, all trapped in the swollen body of the epic studio sprawler. Thus, Gina Lollobrigida's Queen of Sheba, first spotted practically whipping George Sanders' face off, is a distant sister of those "wicked" hellions (she even resembles Jennifer Jones) whose spilling-over energy, even at its most reckless, Vidor celebrated in Duel in the Sun, Beyond the Forest and Ruby Gentry. That her vigor gives way to docilely "humanizing" love as she falls for Yul Brynner's pensively monolithic Solomon might be a sign of the director's transcendentalism or, more likely, a manifestation of the viewer-reassuring, built-in piety that made the genre a dubious staple of American cinema in the '50s. Either way, Vidor grabs whatever chance he gets for expression -- a pagan bacchanalia has some of the writhingly choreographed eroticism of the great revival sequence from Hallelujah (itself a more pungent example of Old Testament fervor), and the reflecting-shield climax that drives the charging Egyptian armies into a chasm is a visual coup no less incredible than the parting of the Red Sea a few years earlier in The Ten Commandments. With Marisa Pavan, David Farrar, John Crawford, Harry Andrews, and Finlay Currie.
--- Fernando F. Croce
|