Cast a Giant Shadow [DVD] [1966]

An epic film with a suitably epic cast. I can watch this film quite regularly, it tells the story of the birth of Israel in a well paced and dramatic manner and Kirk Douglas is certainly on form. The film is inevitable Israeli biased but is essentially telling one side of the recent Middle Eastern Story; all in all a good watch for drama, battle and history.

After an eventful second world war as a soldier in the US Army, Mickey Marcus (played by Kirk Douglas) thinks his days of soldiering are over but he is contacted at Christmas 1947 in New York by a representative of the Jewish government in Palestine asking him to be a military adviser to their forces defending the country. Marcus agrees but when he gets to Palestine he finds that there is no organised army but a multitude of militias that are deeply antagonistic towards each other, they are minute compared to their Arab enemies and woefully ill equipped. Nevertheless, Marcus uses the ability of the Israeli people to improvise and use what little they have to maximum advantage and he knows that so soon after the Holocaust when the memories of these horrific events in Europe are still fresh in their minds the people will fight to the last man as they have nowhere else to go. Marcus has very little time to accomplish his task, he knows that there will be no outside help and that Arab armies are massing on the borders waiting for the UN to make a decision about whether they will agree to independence for Israel.

When the UN passes a resolution agreeing to independence in 1948 and Israel is born five Arab armies attack the country from several points and the first Arab-Israel war commences. Marcus will then see whether what he has done is enough to spare Israel from a second Holocaust.

If you are looking for a film that provides a balanced account of the issues underlying the Arab-Israeli conflict you won't find it here and you should look elsewhere. The trouble is that nobody so far has attempted to make a major feature film that tries to do this so you will have to find the answers in books and fortunately there are some books that have done just this. Cast a Giant Shadow is unashamedly only the Israeli view of the situation and given the boundless capacity of Hollywood to rewrite history as far as America is concerned I wondered whether Mickey Marcus was as important as the film suggests. Sadly the 1948 Arab-Israeli war was only the first war in the region, several more were to follow and the middle east situation with all its dangers for the countries in the region and the wider world is still unsettled.

Douglas puts in a solid performance as Marcus but John Wayne and Frank Sinatra look a bit out of place as if they have been put there to increase star appeal. It is stirring stuff with plenty of action and great enertainment.

As other reviwers have detailed, this may not be a historically balanced and correct account of the Israeli war of independence. But then, few war movies are objective. Perhaps the old "Waterloo" and modern "Gettysburg" are exceptions. But I saw this movie back in 1968 as a teenager, and the scenes were still on my retina when I decided to buy this DVD and see it again. Did it disappoint? Not at all. Here is plain good acting (not stallar but good) and a very good plot. Make your coffee in the scenes between Kirk Douglas and his two women. They are not memorable, but the story of the war works, if you can accept the Israeli biased view and I have no problem there. You really get the feeling here why this people could fight so hard and win. They had nothing to loose. Auschwitz and Treblinka was at their backs and for the first time in thousands of years they finally had the possibility of a real home. These scenes, and how the diagreeing Jewish underground army fractions were pulled together and disciplines are, I venture, not far from what truly happened. I will not saee this DVD again for a long time, but seeing it just once was worth the buy.