Cast a Giant Shadow

Cast a Giant Shadow is a proper war film with a back story – several in fact – fine acting from some Hollywood legends and battle action sequences. I am a bit of glutton for films on Israel’s formation. The most famous is Exodus. It’s so long that American humourist Mort Sahl stood up in the premiere after three hours and said “Let My People Go”. Cast a Giant Shadow bears the imprint of Kirk Douglas, executive producer and lead actor. He plays the role of David “Mickey” Marcus, a graduate of West Point, who received the DSO during World War Two. He is approached in 1947 outside Macy’s store by an Israeli in the Haganah resistance movement played by English actor James Donald, who is normally the senior British officer in POW films, to assist the struggle for independence. Marcus is conflicted between his civvy street career as a lawyer with his married life planning a child with his wife Emma and his conscience as a Jew who was at the liberation of Dachau. Eventually he decides to support Israel a seemingly lost cause as they had no weapons as the British Government who administered Palestine forbade their manufacture.

Marcus realised that for all the guts and resolve of the immigrant and indigenous Jewish populace the war effort was uncoordinated. There were the Palmach, Irgun, Stern Gang ran by future Prime Minster Menachem Begin, and Haganahh the most official of them all. David Ben Gurion presided over all. Marcus predicted that in the face of vastly superior forces and weaponry in the Arab legion the Jewish war effort was hopeless. The air force numbered 4 planes, one flown in the film by Frank Sinatra, was forced to drop soda pops to give the impression of explosions. There is also love interest when Marcus falls for Magda (Senta Berger). A strong cast is completed by Yul Brynner as a Haganah Commander, Topol as a Arab tribe leader who throws in his lot with the Jews, Michael Hordern as British Ambassador and John Wayne in his characteristic gung-ho General role.

The only criticism is the film does not show the Arab view who then – and now – viewed the formation of Israel as the sequestration of their land.

The difference between Dunkirk and Cast a Giant Shadow is the engagement of the cast. Sir Mark Rylance is a great actor as is Kenneth Branagh but they had no idea what Dunkirk was actually like. Kirk Douglas is a committed Jew. The story is told of when he visited a fashionable London Italian restaurant. It was not a Saturday and the head waiter said that was a good choice as that was the night Jews went out. Kirk Douglas folded up the menu, told the waiter he was a Jew and walked out. He would have understood the complex relationship between Jewish people globally and Israel particularly after the Holocaust. Similarly Casbalanca is such a moving film as all but 4 of the cast were emigres.

If you would like to learn more about the volunteers like Marcus in the formation of Israel, here is a link to a moving story in every sense:  VOLUNTEERS AND THE FORMATION OF ISRAEL