David and Bathsheba

Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward

Henry King's David and Bathsheba, from 1951, is an above average biblical epic. King and screenwriter Philip Dunne (How Green Was My Valley, Forever Amber) turn this saga from the second Book of Samuel into an entertaining date night flick which did well at the box office and earned grudging critical respect; even André Bazin liked it. The lead duo, Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward, were at the height of their youthful vitality and popularity. This was Peck's third film with King and he seems more at ease with King than with any other director. They would ultimately collaborate on six films together for 20th Century Fox. Peck is always a bit stiff, but his rectitude fits this kingly role.

Hayward helps loosen up Peck the same way Virginia Mayo does in Horatio Hornblower. The vermillion haired beauty from Brooklyn looks great in Technicolor, but has little to do but tryst with Peck. The two were big sex symbols at the time, though it always has been difficult for me to imagine the rigid Peck as such. Given the emphasis on David's pride and lust in the film, Peck's David is reminiscent of his Lewt McCanles in Duel in the Sun. What with Peck and Hayward rolling around the sands of Arizona, this is truly Lust in the Dust 2.

I've been going through a Henry King phase and feel he is a tad neglected. His stolid style is a good fit for the reverent religious themes found in The Song of Bernadette, Prince of Foxes, and this film. The sequence of a young shepherd interrupting the canoodling of the two lovebirds conveys admirably how their entanglement has led David astray from tending to his flock. Leon Shamroy's (Leave Her to Heaven, Planet of the Apes) cinematography is subtler and more inventive than most Technicolor work of this era. Compare the pastel palette of this film to the splashier one in King's Captain from Castile. Shamroy's use of muted desert tones reminded me of  William Holman Hunt's paintings of the Holy Land, especially The Scapegoat. 

King's films are not the mindless spectacles they seem on the surface. Watching Prince of Foxes for the first time since my childhood, a movie that should have been filmed in Technicolor, I was struck by its allegorical portrait of fascism, embodied by a black shirted Orson Welles as Cesare Borgia. King and Dunne frame the story of David and Bathsheba as a critique of moral absolutism and religious zealotry personified here by Raymond Massey's Nathan, pitched somewhere between Massey's Abe Lincoln and his John Brown. King's sympathy remains with the lovers despite their legacy of sin. Let ye without sin cast the first stone instead of an eye for an eye.

David and Bathsheba is far weirder than one would expect. We see an adulteress, not an adulterer natch, get stoned to death and David's polygamy is flaunted instead of skirted. I guess you got some leeway with the Production Code if you based your film on holy writ. Dunne inserts flashbacks of David's youthful exploits somewhat bizarrely into the final reel. I think it would have made a better prologue. Jayne Meadows plays David's first wife and Gwen Verdon appears in a dance sequence. Francis X. Bushman, Messala in the silent Ben Hur, appears as King Saul. Alfred Newman's score is one of his finest. All in all, David and Bathsheba is a pretty good Bible flick, much better than crap like The Egyptian, The Robe, The Silver Chalice, and even the 1959 Ben Hur.