MEDIOCRE MIRACLES
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television MEDIOCRE MIRACLES BY MARVIN KITMAN The most interesting thing I saw on television this summer was the parting of the Red Sea. This was the highlight of the fourth episode of Moses...
...Still, I preferred the big miracles of Heston...
...In fact, he was William Lancaster, Burt's son...
...There is a lesson here, I think: Every actor should have a son, in case he has to play Moses in a six-part TV series...
...The eighth plague captures some of the DeMillean spirit...
...I guess the combined weight of RAI, ATV and CBS was not enough to pull it off...
...She uses my Hebrew name whenever she chastises me for impatience, one of the curses of being a TV critic...
...It's his one-God business I find hard to accept," says a Bedouin behind Moses' back in language straight from Time magazine's religion page...
...Personally, I would have liked to see Woody Allen do the Exodus story...
...Starring in the second episode along with Lancaster was the burning bush...
...This summer has been a time of drought and famine on TV, when the pestilence of reruns blighted the land of Black Rock and 30 Rock...
...Sinai began to rumble...
...At the end of third episode, as he was leading his people out of their ghetto in Egypt, Moses cried, "To the promised land...
...Director Gianfranco De Bosio's special effects people in Moses the Lawgiver didn't quite show the parting...
...The Book of Exodus, according to my Gideon Bible, on loan from the Sunflower Motel in Norton, Kansas, since 1960, is a short 51 pages, a lean well-paced account of everything...
...And so it was that I went forth into the first episode, and into the second, and into the third, and into the fourth, and encountered the parting of the Red Sea after what seemed like 40 years in the desert...
...I don't know why...
...In the beginning, Moses was played by a baby, unidentified in the screen credits listing the cast of hundreds...
...Oh, I think I'm being summoned," said Moses, rising to his feet and reaching for what looked like his steno pad...
...For some reason, the producers omitted hail from the 10 plagues...
...It was almost as if red algae had crept up the Nile...
...Having grown up with Heston's Moses (who looked like Heston with a beard playing Moses), I was initially taken aback...
...I wasn't eager to hear the additional dialogue cooked up by Burgess and two Italians...
...The infant grew rapidly...
...If they stick to that, the show will be over in an hour, warned my colleague, Professor Owen S. Rachleff of New York University, a Biblical scholar who reviews TV for Midstream...
...It certainly wasn't a question of time...
...Although there was a lot of fast cutting, the best they could do was show something that looked like low tide...
...You should have more charity Moshe," my wife said...
...And in The Ten Commandments the divided sea looked like Niagara Falls going backward...
...I was curious where they got all those new-born babes...
...I should add that Lancaster's Moses was not slow of speech, although the installment was a little slow of plot...
...The resulting lightning and thunder from God, as if on cue, filled me with awe...
...That was the heavily researched epic-directed by Michael Cacoyannis, starring Keith Mitchell, Tony LoBianco and Colleen Dewhurst, and written by Ernest Kinoy-which found that in Pharaoh's time all the Egyptians resembled Yul Brynner...
...Had his performance finally angered God, as it had many of the critics in 1956...
...One is always interested in seeing Niagara Falls going backwards, even if it has nothing to do with the Red Sea...
...After two commercial breaks, he turned into a young man, played by an actor who could be mistaken for Charlton Heston's son...
...Put off thy shoes," the bush suddenly said...
...Maybe if you've seen one parting of the Red Sea, you've seen them all, but whatever the reason, television's version was disappointing, amateur God-stuff, silly, fakey and tacky...
...But no more clever than what my sorcerers can do.' In case you hadn't noticed, the dialogue Burgess and his paisans added to pad the story out to six hours is jarringly contemporaneous...
...Clever," said my friend Professor Rachleff...
...Still, I decided, Moses the Lawgiver was better than nothing...
...I was not impressed with young Lancaster...
...But while nobody likes to be over-critical of Red Sea partings, this one was not all that it might have been...
...I recalled, too, the Jacob and Joseph Bible tale ABC smote us with last season...
...That is a line I haven't been able to find in the Bible yet...
...It is possibly the only understatement he brings to the role...
...For it is written-in the script by Burgess et Alitalia, as well as in the original-that God spoke to Moses through the bush...
...But that's show biz," observed Professor Rachleff...
...The same can even be said of today...
...From time to time, Quayle sounded as if he was reading a speech from Hamlet, but usually he was overshadowed by Lancaster's reading...
...In The Ten Commandments I discovered that Moses' beard grew longer every time he spoke with God...
...Clever, cousin Moses,' Pharaoh remarked...
...Basically, there are two ways to part the Red Sea...
...There was Burt Lancaster, for instance...
...It turned in a fine job, a nonconsummate performance...
...Moses was supposed to be slow of speech and not eloquent, the reason Aaron-played by Anthony Quayle-acted as his spokesman...
...Or maybe Mel Brooks...
...Irene Pap-pas, who played Moses' wife Zip-porah like Anna Magnani, said, "I hope he knows where it is...
...This was the first time I had had the pleasure of hearing the voice of God since the days of DeMille, and it sounded suspiciously like Burt Lancaster's...
...Very clever...
...His Moses looked like Burt Lancaster with a beard playing Moses...
...Lancaster didn't appear, though, until the second episode...
...Naturally, everything is leading up to the parting of the Red Sea...
...Any time they part the Red Sea on TV, you can be sure it's pure television, the visual experience the savants are always saying the medium is really supposed to be...
...Be brave,' she said...
...To be fair, I must hasten to add that De Bosio's miracle department was much better than DeMille's on the pillar of fire...
...This was the highlight of the fourth episode of Moses the Lawgiver (CBS, June 21-August 2), a six-part made-for-TV movie that featured an Italian (Burt Lancaster) playing a Hebrew in a British-Italian production (ATV-RAI) shot in the Middle East for an American audience that really knows its Bible...
...Along the way, many other wonders regaled my eyes...
...The one that blocked Yul Brynner and his army from getting at Chuck Heston and his people looked like the Ajax white tornado...
...Of course, if Heston had been in his expected spot, William Lancaster would have been fine...
...Also, he didn't resemble his father all that much, a distinct disadvantage for someone who has been cast for appearance's sake...
...In the hot sun in olden times many people probably thought they heard voices...
...Actually, some of the best acting in that episode was by babies-the ones set afloat by the Egyptians...
...Of course Miriam, Moses' sister, played by Ingrid Thulin, placed him in the bullrushes...
...I feared I might wind up sloshing around with them in the theological Red Seas, something that is more Professor Rachleff s cup of tea...
...From Central Casting in Cairo," suggested Professor Rachleff...
...Either down the middle or on the left...
...Like two walls of water," it is written...
...Finally, one good thing about any Biblical epic is that you always see something new...
...Generally, whichever method is chosen is OK with me...
...Or no buffers for bald heads...
...In addition, DeMille's special effects staff seemed to capture the Bible better...
...With the exception of Tony LoBianco, who resembled a street thug...
...Burt was standing in the water, and all he did was wave his rod slightly...
...It makes it seem as if the voice of God is in Moses' head...
...The last high point of the second episode was seeing Moses turn the rod into the snake...
...Where the script called for him to stammer a little, he just seemed to have trouble with his lines...
...The same Egyptian kept falling off his surfboard, I mean horse...
...His strength as an actor has always been his power to express anger, and the Moses he gave us was an angry, repressed, middle-aged man...
...Fortunately, Lancaster's interpretation grew on one, like an appetite for unleavened bread...
...Miriam must have seen the screenplay...
...Moses is told to take a handful of dust and hurl it into the sky to bring on darkness...
...There are supposed to be 10 of these, and for openers the river turned to blood, the famous dom...
...The third episode was really super television, with the depiction of the plagues providing one visual spectacular after another...
...At one point in Moses the Lawgiver (episode five or six), Lancaster was relaxing on the sand with his father-in-law when Mt...
...I was reminded of The Endless Summer, an old surfer movie...
...One wouldn't have been surprised to hear a character ask-after word had spread about what Moses had been doing in Egypt-"How's tricks...
...In performing these feats, Lancaster's Moses is quite understated, compared to Charlton Heston's Moses...
...Getting back to the plagues, the Red Nile was followed by flies...
...But Burt Lancaster's style was not nearly as convincing as Charlton Heston's...
...I never care to question a Biblical interpretation, but Jacob and Joseph gave the impression of having been conceived by a bunch of the boys sitting around the swimming pool late one afternoon at the Continental Baths...
...The new version, based on the Book of Exodus, was written by Anthony Burgess and two Italians whose work I am less familiar with...
...Experts tell me you don't need a plague to find flies in the Middle East...
...If Charlton Heston is not involved, one of my basic principles runs, you can't take a story about Moses seriously...
...It probably won't stack up too well against the original, I remember thinking when I first heard about it...
...What had Heston done to be deposed...
...My sorcerers can do that with a yawn,' he said, as it is written in Burgess' script...
...I was impressed, even if Pharaoh wasn't...
...A week later, Lancaster pere appeared, playing Moses with some style...
...I'm a religious fundamentalist this way...
...All were very beautifully done...
...And they did...
...I still shudder to think how close I came to missing this miracle of miracles...
...That is true even if what you happen to be looking at started out as a made-for-movie-theaters movie, like Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956), the 219-minute epic that has multiplied on the tube (through the magic of reruns) faster than the children of Israel...
...Among the others were boils, murrain, "the curse of locusts' teeth," and my favorite plague, frogs...
...CBS-ATV-RAI had solved the problem of not insulting anybody, even viewers who would think it meshugah for someone to claim God spoke unto him...
...Was the eleventh plague, unrecorded in the standard texts, a terrible shortage of eyeliner...
...when the waters came back...
...You have a lot to do...
...But we hadn't seen anything yet in the way of miracles...
Vol. 58 • September 1975 • No. 18
