What film director can
resist the idea of playing God? John Huston sure couldn’t, although he was an
unusual candidate to direct a big-budget religious movie, given he was an
ornery irreligious type. Then again so was Pier Paolo Pasolini, who had made The Gospel According to St Matthew
(1964), which suggests the field of religious films made by atheists might be
one of the smallest but most vital subgenres in existence. Huston had achieved
great respect making films as good as The
Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo
(1949) and The Red Badge of Courage
(1951) in the first decade of his career. By comparison, his work in the late
1950s and ‘60s was generally regarded as patchy and disappointing, a phase
replete with movies made as working holidays and prestige productions that
didn’t live up to their hype. And yet Huston’s restless creative bent in this
phase demands reappraisal, from the live-wire portraits of psychic pain in The Misfits (1961) and Freud (1962) to dealing with taboo
topics on Night of the Iguana (1964)
and Reflections in a Golden Eye
(1967).
The
Bible: In The Beginning... saw Huston accept an offer from Italian
impresario Dino De Laurentiis, to make a film that proved Huston’s
biggest-budget effort, one which gained him little critical favour (Pauline
Kael was a notable exception) and, whilst a big hit, still couldn't earn back its hefty price tag. Released towards the tail-end of the epic movie
vogue, The Bible: In The Beginning...
represented an attempt to break away from the codified style of biblical film
represented in many minds by the likes of The Ten Commandments (1956). Spurning much standard technique of dramatization, Huston instead
worked with playwright Christopher Fry, who had helped pen Ben-Hur without credit, to realise the Bible, or, more accurately,
the first half of the book of Genesis, as a series of starkly illustrative
vignettes, vignettes that extend the semi-surreal, pointedly symbolic
evocations of the dream sequences in Freud
into an entire movie. Huston wields them, much like those dreams, as a system
of representations, a means of anatomising the mental landscape of contemporary
humanity via the potency of their formative parables, recounting the strange,
often brutal mythology of Genesis as a series of calamitous clashes between
deity and creation that slowly but surely shapes civilisation.
Huston moves through well-known stories, trying to find their connective tissue. Adam (Michael Parks) is created
along with Eve (Swedish academic Ulla Bergryd in her only major acting role) and falls from Eden. Cain (Richard Harris) slays brother
Abel (Franco Nero) in jealousy when the Lord prefers his sacrificial offering
of meat, and is driven into a desolate world to found his own depraved race.
Noah (Huston) shepherds his family and the animals aboard the Ark to survive
the Deluge. Nimrod (Stephen Boyd) provokes the ire of God by building the Tower
of Babel. Abram (George C. Scott) and his wife Sarai (Ava Gardner) find
themselves chosen to become parents of nations as Abraham and Sarah, but first
must contend with such travails as Abraham’s nephew Lot being captured in
battle and then taking up residence in the city of Sodom, earmarked by God for
annihilation. Meanwhile Sarah encourages Abraham to father a child with her
Egyptian handmaiden Hagar (Zoe Sallis), resulting in the child Ishmael, but
when Sarah finally gives birth to her own son Isaac, she becomes convinced the
two siblings will repeat the sin of Cain and Abel, and so Abraham casts out
Ishmael and his mother. But the bill comes due when Abraham learns he must
sacrifice Isaac to prove his perfect fidelity to the Lord.
Huston made a
conscientious effort to leave behind the cozy, tony precepts of much mainstream
religious cinema, creating a version of biblical myth that exists at once in a
zone of dreamy abstraction and earthy realism, with interludes that plunge into
a deep zone of atavistic fantasy. Huston's Bible is a place of blood sacrifice and half-glimpsed
obscenities, bifurcated animal carcasses and effete wannabe god-kings, benign
animal lovers, burning sands, world-trees and raging atomic hellfire, all
rendered in terms at once tangibly vivid and subtly stylized by
cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno. Three angels with the same face (Peter
O’Toole) are glimpsed as fluttering, transparent figures across a jagged plain.
The film cumulatively gains a similar quality to many a book cover illustration
from the period in searching for a mode of totemic conceptualism. The most immediate example of this comes in a scene depicting Abram making his covenant with God by
offering up animal sacrifice, laying out the gory results on altar-like stones
hovering in the midst of grand blackness, Scott enacting the rite
in a series of silent movie-like gestures and postures, Huston's images dissolving one into the next.
Huston and Fry use
relatively little dialogue, and what there is of it is derived from the King James Bible, and Huston provides narration
that works with his images to tell the story. The force of his pictures
communicates a primeval zone of being and becoming, but the dandified elegance of the dialogue
promotes an ironic remove. The film opens with a magisterial recounting of the
Creation set to Huston’s documentary footage of erupting volcanoes, roiling
seas, sun-licked cloud, animals and birds, collapsing boundaries between
religious and scientific perceptions of genesis before Adam is seen forming in
the midst of a williwaw. Parks’ Adam with sinewy frame and blithe, faintly
quizzical simplicity, picks himself up and reaches up to Huston’s craning
camera to reproduce Michelangelo’s concept from the creator’s perspective,
creation both fair and abiding but also small, out of reach, already lost to a
physical existence filled with tantalising mystery. Eve appears and Adam first
hides her face before revealing it again, as if shocked by the presence of an
equal and opposite form of identity in the face of his own. The serpent in the
Tree of Good and Evil is glimpsed lurking in the midst of black branches and
white flowers, cut into vague impressions of twisting limbs and hissing mouth,
promising divine knowledge to the oblivious duo.
The shape of the tree is
the mark stamped upon Cain’s brow emblazoning him to eternity as a murderer but
also under God’s protection. Huston extends a dialogue of earth and
heaven in his visuals, shooting Cain’s confrontation of Abel through the heads
of grain stalks and then sending his camera up into the air on a crane to peer
down on the guiltily frantic Cain. Cain’s exile sees him fleeing into grim
volcanic wastes, before Huston portrays his descendants as degenerating into
human sacrifice, developing Huston’s concept of the story of Genesis as one of
pagan sacrificial customs giving way to a new creed. The Noah segment is
perhaps the film’s most straightforward and familiar take on biblical material,
offering the story with jolts of awe and cruel judgement, but laced with
gentle humour, with Huston himself giving a peach of a slapstick performance as
the idealised patriarch who shepherds his family and the animals under his care
with the same knockabout grace, offering an incidental portrait of the man his
daughter Anjelica once suggested liked animals as much or more than people.
Huston had apparently asked his own cinematic god Charlie Chaplin to play the
part, and took the role after he turned it down. Huston’s later casting as the
corrupt titan Noah Cross in Chinatown
(1974) depended to a degree upon Huston’s self-invited biblical associations
from this film, where he also fills in for the voice of God.
Which, as egotistical as
it could seem, is actually one of his best ideas, not only turning the film
into a thesis on his place as manipulator of things and people into images but
also because his vocalisation, with that inimitable undulating enunciation, is
at once authoritative and calm. Huston doesn’t spare the grim side of the
spectacle as the wailing of the desperate remnants of humanity clinging to
mountain peaks is described by Noah as “the chaff whistling in the wind,” but
shifts into studying the benign problems of trying to feed a boat full of
rude animal life. The film’s shortest segment is the Tower of Babel
sequence, and it’s the most disposable, with Boyd swathed in odd make-up
turning up to bark a few tyrannical declamations and fire his arrow at the sky,
provoking God’s wrath. But it also offers the most stunning interlude of
spectacle afforded by De Laurentiis’ customary production grandeur, with a
life-sized mock-up of the tower’s base and cunning use of perspective, with
thousands of actors stampeding down upon a dry plain in abstract forms, and
Boyd and other actors on the peak of the “tower,” evidently actually a natural
landmark. Mid-1960s mainstream movie niceties prevent Huston showing Adam and
Eve naked and any proper wickedness from the Sodomites, so Huston goes the
other way and renders these semi-abstract visualisations.
The
Bible: In The Beginning... is also the closest thing Huston came to making
a musical before Annie (1982),
relying as it does on the dance-like motions of his actors and gestural
intensity to realise their characters — the vague and tentative attitudes of Adam
and Eve, Cain’s contorted limbs and loping gait, Noah’s blend of clumsiness and
deftness, Abraham’s steady and strident authority. Huston imbues a quality of
nightmarishness to his take on scripture that's rather unique, matched only in
flashes by the likes of George Stevens and Martin Scorsese in their portraits
of Jesus interacting with Satan. The visit to Sodom turns into a kind of
orchestrated dance number to suggest unspeakable perversities, the city's weirdo denizens adapting
themselves into the shadows or melding into the architecture, faces leering out
of the dark and human forms slithering in insinuated obscenity. Only here and there is the occasional
direct glimpse of grotesquery, from an obese woman being fed and caressed by a
cadre of male and female sex slaves to a woman being forced to kiss a bejewelled goat and going
into ecstatic frenzies. Huston makes O’Toole’s eyes of hallucinatory blue, long
a point of fixation for his shooters, into an actual weapon of cinematic and
magical impact as he glare, turned upon the massing Sodomites, striking them
blind.
Huston caps the sequence
with a disturbing prophetic echo as he portrays Sodom as obliterated under the
shadow of a mushroom cloud, an interpolation reminiscent of his revision of
Melville to have the fated meeting with Moby Dick’s (1956) white whale at Bikini Atoll. The transformation of Lot’s
wife’s (Eleonora Rossi Drago) into a pillar of salt resembles the scorching
ossification under the flash of the atomic bomb. Later Huston has Abraham and
Isaac (Luciano Conversi) visit the city’s scorched and shattered ruins, where
the patriarch rages in awe of his deity’s judgemental power whilst Isaac stands
beggared at the wrath that consumed even the nominally innocent, the ground
littered with scorched skulls with snakes slithering out of the eye sockets.
Huston’s confrontation with the arcane, inhumane ferocity implicit in so much
of the Old Testament’s foundational stories is connected with modernity’s new
reach of apocalyptic impact, and the thesis of the film overall is the human
propensity for self-annihilation.
The wickedness that
sparks the Deluge is characterised by Huston as human sacrifice, helping
further his conception of Genesis as a process leading from the
blithe innocence of Eden to a desperate attempt to gain control over eternity
and being. This is connected with the resolutely human-level dramas of lineage
and sexuality played out in the triangle of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, in the
search for a pedigree of faithful pillars to found nations: Huston sees in them
the roots for the personages and ghost-selves of Freud’s exploration of the
family unit as nest of perversity and sexuality as the serpent that will not
rest in the foliage (not at all surprisingly, Sallis was to become the mother
of Huston’s actor son Danny). Where The
Bible: In The Beginning… becomes awkward is when it tries to shift out of
its recitative-like structure and offer up more traditional dramaturgy, and the
film takes a swerve to more familiar territory as Scott and Gardner try to play
love scenes whilst reciting pseudo-olden poesy. Scott however, with his hawkish
eyes and shattered granite visage, looks the perfect biblical patriarch.
Huston had a habit of
employing interesting composers for his movies, sometimes with little to no
previous film scoring experience, as with Philip Sainton who had scored Moby Dick. Here he hired Japanese
composer Toshiro Mayuzumi to bring a jolt of strangeness to the proceedings,
particularly apparent in the spare, sonorous passages in the Eden scenes. Huston’s labours here
seem from today’s vantage very much like the seed for a later breed of
religious filmmaking. This film must have been a particularly strong influence on Darren
Aronofsky’s Noah (2014), in blurring boundaries between distant historicism and post-apocalyptic science-fantasy,
and perhaps on Mel Gibson’s The Passion
of the Christ (2004), in trying to reduce much of the onscreen drama to a
state of stark reportage drawing directly on the biblical text. The Sodom
scenes seem to have had a strong impact on Federico Fellini, whose Fellini - Satyricon (1969) would adopt a
similarly drifting, surveying perspective to glimpse human squalor and freakishness in
his outsized and dreamlike Rome (and Rotunno would shoot it as well). Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which would more thoroughly translate
Genesis into sci-fi, reproduces Huston’s analogy as well as his visual
evocation of a questing for knowledge and transcendence entwined with a deadly
and marauding sin, the first battles of the apes in his rude and blasted
wilderness taking up a tune first whistled by Huston in his Cain and Abel
sequence.
Flashes of great visual
force continue, as in an astonishingly staged sequence when Abraham leads a
raid on an enemy encampment to rescue Lot and other prisoners. Rotunno’s long,
dashing camera movements regard backdrops aglow against pitch dark, stampeding
animals with brands tied to their horns and charging avengers
careening through the night to bring fire and the sword. The film ends with the
near-sacrifice of Isaac and the reprieve, with its frightening and debatable
statements about faith intact but also with Huston’s inference that the search
for a version of human nature resistant to mere impulse and egotism gains at
last a fulfilment, measuring the ironic paternal tenderness in Abraham’s
binding and proffering of Isaac and the boy’s acquiescence to it and finding
likeness to the seemingly contradictory demand that humanism only
flourish when human will recognises its own limitations and the looming proximity of death, the entwined acts of
adoration and annihilation perceived on both divine and personal levels, mercy
only obtainable when the child is bound and the flint knife red from other
slaughters ready for the plunge.
