08 Nov Cast a Giant Shadow
Cast a Giant Shadow, movie starring Kirk Douglas
(1966) “Cast a Giant Shadow” is the true story of U.S. Army officer David “Mickey” Marcus who went to Palestine in 1948 to help train the Israeli army.
It is based on the book of the same name by Ted Berkman. In the 1930’s Marcus was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York and prosecuted gangsters such as Lucky Luciano. When World war II broke out, he became an intelligence officer for the US Army. After the war, he was the foreign correspondent who gave an eyewitness account on ABC Radio of the 1946 explosion of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
Kirk Douglas plays Marcus, dedicated to the military, much to the dismay of his beautiful wife, played by Angie Dickinson. I thought Kirk looked better than Angie. It’s hard to know what in the movie was “real” but without a doubt this Jewish American was a hero to Israel. He became their first modern general, or in Hebrew “Aluf.”
Yul Brynner, John Wayne, and Frank Sinatra had smaller roles. The movie spent too much time on the main character’s dilemmas with the women in his life. I wonder how his widow felt when the film came out.
Other than that, I enjoyed watching this retelling of the story of Israel in the first years after the war. The exteriors were shot in Israel. In the movie, Kirk Douglas (as Marcus) gradually comes to terms with the fact that he is Jewish and that he belongs to Israel.
Cast a Giant Shadow at amazon.com
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