(avg. read time: 8–17 mins.)
In case I have not made it clear from past reviews, I enjoy watching older movies. I have watched movies from every decade of their existence. I like being introduced to a classic for the first time and reflecting on how those classics are both products of their time and (where applicable) transcendent of their eras. I also appreciate finding a movie that has become a largely forgotten classic. At the same time, I have found that I just cannot connect with some of those movies like previous generations did for whatever reason. And then there are those cases where you realize that a movie has been forgotten for good reason. Today’s movie is a case of the last experience.
If you are of the opinion that the market has been oversaturated with superhero movies since the 2000s, just know that the oversaturation and diluted quality is meager compared to the market movies once witnessed with biblical adaptations and (especially) Westerns. Since there was greater interest in such stories and since biblical reenactments had been a well-established and widespread cultural practice, it is unsurprising that many biblical (and para-biblical) film (and eventually TV) adaptations were successful, and a lot of people wanted a piece of the pie for what were considered low-risk projects. As with other popular genres, the push to produce something from so many quarters also meant a general lack of quality of control, meaning that only a relative few were not only commercially successful in their own time, but were also projects that truly stood the test of time. David and Goliath from 1960 is not one of them.
Unlike my reviews of Ben-Hur and Barabbas, this one is not going to be a virtually scene-by-scene review. I simply do not see the point. Instead, the format is going to be one of identifying “the Good,” “the Bad,” and “the Ugly.”
The Good
What got me interested in picking up this movie on a trip to Vintage Stock was that it featured Orson Welles, and I was not aware he had ever been in such a movie. He was once on top of the entertainment world in the first half of the twentieth century between his work in theater (including a highly touted adaptation of Julius Caesar), radio (including work on The War of the Worlds and The Shadow, one of the fathers of comic book superheroes), and movies (most notably, Citizen Kane). Moreover, I learned he was playing Saul, a character with plenty of dramatic potential in a visual adaptation. He did not really look the part, as Saul was supposed to be exceptionally tall among the Israelites, but he certainly had the ability to play the part.
Welles was by far the most renowned of the directors to work on this movie. The twist is that he only directed his scenes. And there is a noticeable difference in quality between scenes that he directs and scenes that Richard Pottier directs. This is not only because of Welles’s own performance, particularly in his non-verbal acting, but also because other scenes are either not paced well or they show other evidence of lack of care. I do not know if this was intentional, but the fact that Welles looks so uncomfortable and like he does not want to be here ironically fits the characterization of Saul in a way, since Saul did not initially want to be king and does not really act fit for his office. It may not be one of Welles’s best performances, but as far as I am concerned, it is the best in the movie, and it is not even close. Saul is presented as a tragic, depressed, and weak-minded figure who shows regret for what he has done but who does not bring himself to correct his course because he falsely thinks he cannot do otherwise. At least, that is until he becomes more familiar with David. Oddly enough, Saul is presented as the one who tries to smooth over relations with David, rather than the other way around. That much does not work especially well with the biblical source, but it fits the screenplay well enough.
An interesting bit of characterization and storytelling that I did not anticipate at the start came with the ending. Abner has been plotting to kill David, and Saul plays along with it, acting as if he supports the assassination. That would fit the biblical Saul’s character, obviously. And clearly Abner’s plot could not succeed if this story is to bear the slightest resemblance to its source. But the way it failed was interesting. That is, after playing along like he wants the plan to succeed, Saul outwits Abner and slays him with an arrow before he can kill David with his spear. Afterwards, Saul tries to rally Israel to David, as he wants David to take over. David refuses, of course, and Saul admits his wrongdoing but reluctantly accepts his responsibility to continue being king. Yes, you cannot square this with the biblical story, but I thought it was an interesting way of characterizing Saul.
And … that is pretty much it. There are certain aspects of the movie that I would not necessarily call “good,” but they do not fit in the other categories either. Ivica Pajer as David is not bad, but he is just … there. I think the same of Abner, Merab, and much of the other main cast. They are not outstandingly good or bad. They are simply forgettable.
The Bad
While I do think that the scenes Welles directed are the best in the movie, they are not without their flaws. For example, whether it was lack of care on Welles’s part or Hilton Edwards not cooperating, the latter’s portrayal of Samuel left something to be desired. He clearly focused on vocal delivery with all his force and flourishes. But he is presented as needing two canes to walk. Yet it is clear from how he acts that the canes are merely props that he had to use. He does not act particularly feeble or like using his canes for any purpose other than keeping him upright can affect his balance or ability to stand. This shows that even Welles was not at his most attentive here. And it is not like he was particularly invested in this project.
While ADR is ubiquitous in the world of film, this is one of the bad examples of its implementation. Of course, ADR is used for dubbing over a film in another language, and that in itself is not a bad thing. It is most noticeable when the dubbing has continued after the actor’s lips stop moving and when the lip movements do not match the words. But it is worse when the actor’s lips are not moving at all and yet there are still lines being said simply because the ADR is attempting to make up for either the director’s or the script’s neglect. We see some examples of that in this movie as soon as David’s first scene. If this was a matter of some of these scenes being done in Italian first, it is more a problem of incoherence with Saul’s scenes, which were clearly done in English from the beginning. There could have been some potential to use what would have been incoherence to the film’s advantage, say by having all the scenes in Israel originally done in one language and the ones in Philistia done in another. But that would have required some attention to detail, and they were not here for that.
Although the movie does not generally have good quality audio, the worst aspect of it has to be the score. It is rather generic and poorly mixed. I mean that both in the sense that the music does not necessarily fit the scene it is linked to and in the sense that it is either too loud for background music or has some discordant audio peaking.
The editing in this movie also leaves much to be desired. Besides some rather choppy shots showing some errant cuts in the film, transitions can be rather harsh. For example, the first scene with Abner and Merab takes place at night in a room that only has unnatural light on the actors and Merab is clearly rushing to get her lines out, but then after a quick swipe right we are suddenly in a brightly lit room in Philistia with completely different characters, one of whom starts speaking one second after Merab’s line is finished.
Another harsh transition has no effects to make it even marginally smoother. This comes after David uses a sling (releasing underhanded in a way that is neither the most forceful nor the most accurate) to launch a rock at a helmet set up on a target. Immediately after the rock hits the helmet, we are suddenly back in the palace with Abner sending an emissary to parley for the return of the ark.
A similar issue with editing comes in a certain moment when David is in Saul’s throne room while his voiceover reflects on how Saul has fallen from his past glory. While he is staring at the throne, there is a moment when he sees some shade that is apparently supposed to be a younger, better version of Saul. I say “apparently” because the visual proves to be too dim and too indistinct from the black background to clearly convey what exactly is supposed to be going on here. For all the purpose it served, Welles might as well have convinced Pottier to include the bird screech from Citizen Kane here.
In terms of casting, I mentioned already that most of the cast is nothing to write home about. One person I should mention, though, is the man who plays Goliath. Aldo Pedinotti, credited as “Kronos,” was a giant man who performed in circuses and had parts in movies centered on his gigantic size, as tends to happen with such actors. He is said to have been close to the right height for Goliath at nearly 6’ 8” tall.1 But they made the mistake of giving him an expanded role that requires more of him than just being a spectacle. They ought to have tried drawing attention away from his limitations as an actor. Even in the matter of facial expressions, he does not appear to have been given any clear direction.
Story-wise, many peculiar decisions were made, some of which will be addressed in the next section on the adaptational choices. One of the most nonsensical decisions was making David’s sling a gift from his young lover Egla (a.k.a. Lady Not-Appearing-in-the-Bible), featuring her in two scenes early in the movie, and then having her suddenly killed off by a lightning strike. It makes you wonder what she was even there for. Is the point supposed to be that God is saying, “Nope, none of that” to David? It appears to be contrived to give David a crisis of faith that he quickly gets over and which does not shape his character in any clear way thereafter, except in a scene where he mentions her in dialogue with Michal. But that scene just seems like an attempt to salvage something that was already in the script. Nothing about David’s larger story would have substantially changed if the five-minute love story was removed entirely. The sling could have just been something one of his parents gave to him, if not something he made himself.
A mix of story and editing issues come with a couple of sequences in the movie where a scene is interrupted by a quick scene, only for the first scene to resume again. No artistic value is added by these interruptions. It simply appears that the filmmakers could not find a better place for the shorter scenes or that they forgot where they were supposed to be after the film was accidentally dropped in a woodchipper.
For no apparent reason, Samuel and David have Force powers. More specifically, they have the ability to communicate telepathically a la Obi-Wan and Luke. Samuel’s voice comes into David’s mind at multiple points, and at first I thought it was just him reflecting on something Samuel said or Samuel’s voiceover simply adding to the scene. But there is a definite time where David hears Samuel’s voice in his mind and he says, “Aye, Samuel.” I can only surmise that the scene was so rushed because either they could not get Edwards on the set that day, or the whole idea was rushed and not thought out.
Also rushed and not thought out was the notion that the Philistine king had heard of David and that he was somehow renowned already. How this was supposed to be the case is never explained, nor was it needed. The biblical story got along fine without it.
The Ugly
Perhaps the most obvious entry in this category is the film’s visual and audio quality. It is not pleasant to look at or to listen to with the rough picture quality and the score that never appears to be on the right setting. This is not simply because it is an old movie, as you can see plenty of movies from this era (or before) that are not as much of an eyesore or earache. The colors throughout are so muted or so bleeding into each other due to the low-quality visuals, including frequently changing color temperature both between scenes and within scenes, that I had to wonder if this would not have been better done in black and white. That would not have helped the storytelling or the audio quality for that matter, but I think it would have been some improvement. Low-budget films are not necessarily ones that look or sound this bad. It is more evidence of the lack of care that went into this production.
The adaptational approach as a whole can, I think, be fairly described as ugly. There are so many strange choices made for the sake of telling a much less interesting story than the source material provides. It leaves us with a story where not a lot happens over the course of 90+ minutes, and what does happen makes for a poor adaptation of the source.
For example, two events are taken over from earlier parts of 1 Samuel to move this story along that were completely unnecessary. This version of the story is supposed to begin when the Philistines have taken the ark of the covenant from Israel, but this happened before Saul was king. Indeed, it happened before Samuel was a judge of Israel. But now it is made into a symbol of God’s rejection of Saul as king. Thus, we never get the scene of the statue of Dagon collapsing before the ark. What is more, this decision is entirely pointless because we never see the ark of the covenant or Israel reclaiming it.
The other event that is made to be an impetus for the story is some treaty in which the Philistines will not allow Israelites to bear weapons, except for the king and his guards. There is no treaty really like this in 1 Samuel, but the closest equivalent is the note in 1 Sam 13 that there were no blacksmiths in Israel and so the Israelites had to pay the Philistines to make their metal weapons. But this is linked to a subsequent battle led by Saul and Jonathan, not to the battle lines being drawn up in the Valley of Elah. It just seems so odd that they would overthink the cause for the battle.
Although I mentioned that it leads to an interesting twist, the initial decision to make Abner a villain for this story was a baffling one. He is plotting to usurp Saul through his affair with Saul’s eldest daughter Merab. By itself, if the biblical story did not exist (in which case, this movie would not), that kind of machination would make sense. But there is no connection between Merab and Abner in the biblical story, and Abner does not become an obstacle to David until after Saul dies. He actually ends up surrendering the rest of the kingdom to David and would have been his ally, if not for Joab assassinating him.
David is made into a kind-hearted rebel who sees the degeneracy and godlessness among the Jerusalemites and condemns Saul for being the cause of Israel’s fall. Not only does it not make sense in this part of the story for Saul to be ruling from Jerusalem (as Saul appears to have resided in Gibeah or Gilgal at different points), and not only does it not make sense for the priests to bring David into a temple that should not be standing yet, but this portrayal is decidedly against what we see in 1 Samuel about David. David never openly challenged Saul. In fact, at every opportunity, he assured Saul that he had no wish to harm him, much less see him overthrown. When a man claimed to have killed Saul to curry favor with David, David had him executed (2 Sam 1).
But they end up forgetting the severity of his speech in the next scene. Despite his open defiance of Saul, Saul wants David brought to him, seemingly without violence. But it appears that they simply forgot to film how David was contacted and brought into the palace. There is an exterior shot of him, and then he appears in the palace. Well, glad we got that worked out.
Then a whole lot of nothing happens in the movie until we get to the reason this movie is titled as it is. The battle in the Valley of Elah bears little resemblance to the biblical narration, except that David strikes Goliath with a stone from his sling and subsequently cuts his head off. But everything around the fight was changed so as to be unrecognizable. Even the fight itself features Goliath living through the stone crashing into his face (rather than his forehead), so that he is killed from David decapitating him. The Philistines charge Israel after this instead of fleeing … just because, I guess. It was not even to justify a well-done battle scene, because it is not. It is dull, shot too close, lacking in interesting choreography, and it is overall quite unimpressive. And the time between the clash and the resolution is approximately two minutes. The procession with the looping music that follows the victory lasts longer than this battle. That quick of a battle might have made more sense if it was a rout immediately after Goliath’s death like in the original story, but not for a climactic clash only after which the rest of the much larger Philistine forces retreat, citing the death of Goliath that did not stop them from charging in the first place.
I have already mentioned the ending, but it is rather hilariously off-base to suggest that things were alright between David and Saul from here on. Saul even gives Michal to David in betrothal, not even requiring the foreskins of all those dead Philistines as a seemingly impossible task first. Merab’s part in plotting with her lover is never addressed, presumably because it was never important.
Other odd choices can be mentioned more briefly. First, Samuel’s prophecy about what a king would do in 1 Sam 8 is also made to fall entirely upon Saul as being the sort of person he was foretelling about. In fact, the fulfillment of his declarations will be seen in the reigns of Saul, David, and Solomon, as well as others. Second, even though there is no account of dating biblical books according to which Ecclesiastes would have been written before the events of this story, Samuel quotes the book twice after saying, “it is written.”
These various points show how little care went into this movie. And that is why I put so little care into this review compared to my other adaptation reviews. Do not bother with this version of David and Goliath.
In almost all English Bibles, the translations of 1 Sam 17:4 reflect the Hebrew equivalent of “six cubits and a span,” which is generally taken to be 9’ 6”, 9’ 9”, or something close to that. The only exceptions among English translations that I know of are ISV, NET, and NRSVUE. The majority follows the Masoretic Text (also supported by the Vulgate and Targum Jonathan), but the LXX has “four cubits and a span,” as does Josephus (Ant. 6.171), and the much older text of Qumran (4QSama/4Q51), which is the more likely reading. People of such height are still considered gigantic today outside of the context of the NBA, and it would be all the more so back then. I do not know the average height of corpses from that era, but I have seen estimates that the average height of a man in the land of Israel in the first century CE was around 5’ 4” (based on skeletons that have been found). See Craig A. Evans and N. T. Wright, Jesus, the Final Days: What Really Happened (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 71. I do not suppose that there would have been a huge difference, even given the time gap, but I cannot say so for sure.