In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.
In the 1960s, famed producer Dino de Laurentiis decided to make a series of films that would retell the entire Old Testament. He would get a famed and well-regarded director to make each film in turn and thus create an epic series of films worthy of their source material. What happened instead was that this movie was made over a series of years and after the ungodly (pun intended) amount of money poured into it, the entire project faltered and we never got to see, you know, the big budget spectacle of the Book of Amos directed by Fellini or whatever. I mean, it’s an idea without a prayer (okay, I’ll stop with the jokes) from the beginning. This movie alone takes almost three hours to get not even halfway through the book of Genesis and, lest we forget, there are a whole other 38 books in the Old Testament.
Well, did we at least get one good movie out of the whole misbegotten ordeal? I regret to inform you that we did not. This movie basically starts with the Creation and ends with the story of Abraham taking Isaac to Mount Moriah in order to sacrifice him and over the three hours of the film, we get Noah and the Flood, Cain & Abel, the Tower of Babel, Sodom & Gomorrah . . . all the highlights, all told in the most ponderous and self-important way possible. Huston narrates the film (and also plays Noah) by portentously intoning the Scriptures and the film’s tone is overall just far too stodgy for me. I like Biblical films when they bring out the more human elements of these religious icons, but in this film, that’s all they are: icons, shuffling through their paces like they’re in a middle-school Kids Krusade Bible play. There are some sporadic bits that work, most of them courtesy of George C. Scott’s Abraham. I wouldn’t have thought of Scott for an Old Testament Patriarch, but he’s able to really deliver in a couple of the more fire & brimstone passages. There’s a scene of him raging at God after God orders him to sacrifice Isaac that is genuinely really intense and pretty good. Peter O’Toole also has a cool cameo in the Abraham section of the film as all three of the mysterious angels who visit Abraham’s tent in one story; I thought that was a pretty cool effect. There’s a really long tracking shot in the Tower of Babel scene that includes tons of extras and, yeah, I’m really reaching here. The film is rarely actively bad (Richard Harris’ histrionic performance as Cain is the exception), but it’s just deadly dull most of the time. This was a huge hit at the time, but I’m glad it didn’t kick start the franchise de Laurentiis wanted. As Leonard Maltin said, read the book instead. 1 ½ stars.
tl;dr – stodgy, pretentious, overlong, slow-moving and often deathly dull, this Biblical epic isn’t even worthy of the name; small wonder this didn’t kickstart the planned franchise. 1 ½ stars.