A Catered Affair

Cast a Giant Shadow, another exercise in movie biography, may be filed as a case of mistaken identity: any resemblance to persons living or dead is sacrificed to make elbowroom for Hero Kirk Douglas. The ostensible hero is Colonel David "Mickey" Marcus, a Jewish graduate of West Point who became New York City's crime-busting commissioner of correction under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, was a wartime adviser to President Roosevelt and helped to organize the Nurnberg trials. In 1948, after serving as unofficial military adviser to Israel, he became supreme commander of the Israeli armies fighting the Arabs around Jerusalem, was accidentally killed only hours before the U.N. ceasefire.

Shadow expends most of its energy on flame-licked scenes of the Arab-Israeli war, and Douglas expends his trying to find a clue to the character of Marcus; but the smoke screens dreamed up by Writer-Director Melville Shavelson are nearly impenetrable. As Marcus' unhappy wife, Angie Dickinson stays at home, smiling through her fears and reminiscing in murky flashbacks. As the hero's lively helpmate in the Haganah, Senta Berger manages to make half-baked fiction look like a whole girl. Guest Star John Wayne, perhaps inadvertently, turns his role as a Pentagon overlord into an uncanny impersonation of President Johnson, while Luther Adler, sporting a ludicrous Ben-Gurion hairdo, pretends to be an Israeli leader named Zion.

The film's dialogue suggests an uneasy truce between Zionism and Hollywood hipsterism. "We've already lost 6,000,000 people," snaps one patriot. 'Do you want us to try for seven?" To top the evidence that Shadow should not be taken seriously, if at all, Frank Sinatra pops in as a soldier-of-fortune silot who quips, "Hey, don't leave me here alone, I'm anti-Semitic." Musical-comedy exuberance dominates a battle scene that has Sinatra aloft in a Piper Cub, bombing Egyptian tanks with Seltzer bottles and spraying soda at their planes. By then, the movie has trimmed its theme to fit the formula of any Clannish catered affair.

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