FILE 001 · FOUNDING · DRAFT
Directed by Otto Preminger. Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, from Leon Uris's 1958 novel. 212 minutes. Holocaust survivors break out of the British camps on Cyprus and sail for Palestine; the film ends on the eve of the 1948 war.
Chosen for: Oscar for best score; about $20 million worldwide. Selection rules
Future type: Integrative, open only to the Arab who dies a friend
Key scene
Timecode: to be added · Closing scene
Karen, a young survivor, and Taha, the Arab friend, are laid in one grave. Over it, Ari swears that Jews and Arabs will one day share the land in life as they now share it in death. Then the trucks leave for war. The film can picture a shared future only over a shared grave.
The five questions
Does the film show a future in which the conflict is over?
Everything moves towards statehood: the ship that is let through, the state that is coming, the eulogy that promises peace. The war that follows is shown as a passage, not an outcome. The future is certain; only its date is open.
Is there a place in that future for Palestinians?
One Arab has a place: Taha, the village headman and Ari's childhood friend, drawn with warmth. But he earns it by warning the Jews and pays for it with his life. The Arabs who fight are led by the Mufti and trained by a German Nazi; the people of Taha's village drop out of the story. The future has room for a friend, not for a people.
To check while watching: whether the village's residents are seen again after Taha's death, and how the Nazi figure is introduced.
Do the characters believe the promise can be kept?
No one doubts the destination. The quarrel between Ari's father, who trusts diplomacy, and his uncle Akiva, who leads the Irgun's bombs, is a quarrel about means. Even the American outsider, Kitty, ends up on the trucks.
Is the price of the promise shown, and who pays it?
The film does not hide its own side's violence: the Irgun bombs the King David Hotel, and the family argues about it. But the price that is mourned is Jewish: Akiva, Karen, Dafna before them. The dead of the hotel and the Arabs displaced by the war are not counted.
Does the film ground its future in the Holocaust?
Three ways. The refugees are survivors, and the camps on Cyprus echo the camps they left. Dov's confession of what was done to him in Auschwitz is the price of entry into the Irgun. And the enemy in Palestine is led by a Nazi, with swastikas painted on the walls where Taha is found. The film carries the moral order of the Holocaust into 1948: whoever opposes the state stands with the Nazis.
To check while watching: the content of Dov's confession. Accounts disagree on whether the film keeps the novel's Sonderkommando past or replaces it.
Film and record
Before the film
Evidence level: Institutional, pending confirmation in primary sources. The AFI Catalog reports Israeli navy ships playing British ones.
The British Army refused to help. According to the AFI Catalog, Israeli destroyers were sent to Cyprus to stand in for British ships, and US Marines played British soldiers; the US Defense Department barred off-duty servicemen from appearing.2
Shooting ran from March to June 1960.2 Adolf Eichmann was captured in Buenos Aires in May 1960 and brought to Israel for trial: the Holocaust returned to the headlines while the film was being made.
A widely repeated story says a public-relations man commissioned Uris to write the novel for Israel. Critics of the story note that it rests on the PR man's own later boast and is not supported by Uris's papers or his biographers.7 Until a document settles it, the file does not use it.
Politics around the film
Israel was twelve years old, four years after the Suez war, and the United States had not yet made it a close ally. The film was screened at Cannes in 1961 out of competition.1
Writing in Film Quarterly, Gideon Bachmann called it "the best promotion Israel ever had".1
Scholars credit the novel and film with shaping how Americans understood Israel's founding, as a frontier and liberation story told in American terms.5 The promise spoken over the grave, a land shared in life, has not been kept.
Sources