The Return of ‘Exodus’

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, LACMA is presenting at 7:30 p.m. Friday and again on Saturday “Exodus,” Otto Preminger’s epic--210 minutes plus intermission--1960 film version of Leon Uris’ novel on the struggle of the Jews to create a homeland in Palestine in the wake of the Holocaust. A shrewd blend of history and Hollywood heroics, “Exodus” holds up remarkably well, thanks to astute craftsmanship and a story that is unfolding still. Although a bit slow to the windup, “Exodus” is an absorbing, potent work of pop mythology that leaves you with a powerful sense of the challenge and magnitude of the Israeli achievement.

From the opening strains of composer Ernest Gold’s familiar theme, you are in the capable hands of Hollywood pros, with Preminger’s masterly, vigorous direction, Dalton Trumbo’s script, which lays out with clarity the complex and tortuous history of Israel’s birth and sustains several story lines, and Sam Leavitt’s cinematography, which sweeps over the Jewish detention camps of Cyprus to the ancient settlements and rugged landscape of Israel itself.

Trumbo’s dialogue has its corny moments, purple patches and inevitable preachy passages, and the cast is jarringly uneven--with John Derek, for example, as an Arab nobleman straight out of a Maria Montez movie--but on the whole “Exodus” is a formidable accomplishment embracing suspense, danger, passion, romance, politics, religion, intrigue, sacrifice and bravery in an entertaining fashion for 3 1/2 hours.

“Exodus” is blessed in its stars; Paul Newman is outstanding as a young officer--based on Yitzhak Rabin--in the Haganah, Palestine’s Jewish underground, who springs more than 600 Jews from a Cyprus internment camp in 1947 and places them on an old freighter renamed “Exodus,” where they go on a successful hunger strike in protest of a British blockade. So is Eva Marie Saint as an elegant American woman who has lost her news-photographer husband, killed while covering a border skirmish in Palestine, and eventually casts her lot with the Jewish cause and gradually falls in love with Newman, although they haven’t much time for romance. Newman and Saint have been given complex, mature characters to play. Saint, it’s also worth noting, has a wardrobe designed by Rudi Gernreich with such timeless simplicity and understatement that she could wear it today.

Once Newman et al. have arrived in Haifa the plot thickens with the intensifying conflict between the Haganah, which perceives United Nations approval of a Jewish state within grasp, and the Irgun, the Jewish terrorist organization which the Haganah sees as a threat to that approval. Conveniently, Newman’s father (Lee J. Cobb) is a Haganah leader while his brother (David Opatoshu, in a wrenching portrayal) is an Irgun leader. Trumbo’s script is notable for its fair-mindedness to Arabs and even the British.

What you don’t expect of so stirring an epic is that it ends not on the expected note of triumph but of tragedy--and an expression of a dream of lasting peace between Arab and Jew that is yet to be fulfilled. (323) 857-6010.

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Two years ago, a Salt Lake City high school senior named Kelli Peterson, sick of feeling miserable and isolated, helped co-found the Gay-Straight Alliance for gay students and for straight students trying to understand better their gay relatives. Her 15-member group unwittingly unleashed a firestorm, with the state Legislature voting to ban all extracurricular clubs in high schools rather than permit any on-campus meetings involving gay men and lesbians. The unfolding of Peterson’s story and her ultimate victory become the frame of Jeff Dupre’s outstanding documentary “Out of the Past” (Grande 4-Plex Friday for one week), which premiered at Outfest in July.

Here, Dupre discusses the lives of Puritan cleric Michael Wigglesworth, 19th century novelist Sarah Orne Jewett, pioneer activists Henry Gerber and Barbara Gittings, and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who organized the 1963 March on Washington but was not allowed to lead it because he was gay. Dupre makes a strong case for the importance of reclaiming gays from history in giving young people a sense of identity and in breaking down stereotypes. The Grande 4-Plex is on the lower level of the Marriott Hotel, 345 S. Figueroa St., downtown Los Angeles, (213) 617-0268.

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It’s been said that the films of Jacques Demy are like a series of intersecting circles. His people part only to meet again years later--that is, if they’re lucky. Along the way there are points of tangency with others seeking to round out the arcs of their lives. Thus, the structure that emerges in a Demy film lends itself perfectly to the lyricism of his collaborator, composer Michel Legrand, and to the director’s recurrent theme of the search for love.

In 1967, Demy and Legrand followed up their international hit “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” with another exquisite film, “The Young Girls of Rochefort,” that combines Gallic elegance with American exuberance. It returns Friday at the Royal for a regular engagement with a print restored under the guidance of Demy’s widow, director Agnes Varda. At its heart this movie is an homage to the Hollywood musical. What it lacks in memorable songs it makes up in exciting dances, dynamically choreographed by Norman Maen and performed by Gene Kelly and George Chakiris.

Demy manages to remind us about how much our lives are ruled by chance. Yet beneath the surface of Demy’s unabashed romanticism, heightened here, as before, by Bernard Evein’s rich, chic decor, there is a toughness of spirit. (For all the delicate scrollery of Demy’s style, it’s resilient enough to sustain a detailed reference to a trunk murder without breaking the picture’s lyric tone.) Life may be full of disappointments, but Demy demands that his people meet the world with a song and a smile. All of his work has been in tribute to those who face adversity gallantly, as he did himself when struck with the leukemia that claimed his life in 1990. (310) 477-5581.

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will present Friday at 8 p.m. “Show Boat” (1936) as the first of a series of upcoming events, at the California African American Museum, the Watts Labor Community Action Center and the UCLA Film Archive, commemorating the centennial birthday of Paul Robeson, who played the noble Joe in the most faithful of the three film versions of the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein musical from the Edna Ferber novel.

“Show Boat” marked a departure for director James Whale, a specialist in the macabre, and was also the apotheosis of his career. It is a stylish, durable piece of epic Americana, replete with some of the most beloved songs in musical theater and rich in its sense of period. It boasts a splendid, indeed definitive, cast headed by Irene Dunne as the lovely Magnolia, fated to fall for Allen Jones’ dashing riverboat gambler, Gaylord Ravenal. From the original Broadway production are heart-wrenching Helen Morgan as the tragic Julie as well as Robeson and Hattie McDaniel as Joe’s spunky wife. Subtle and sensitive, ‘Show Boat’ is marred only by its sentimental modern-day epilogue, a device beloved by Ferber. Most striking are the expressionistic vignettes with which Whale dramatizes Robeson’s famed basso-profundo rendering of “Ol’ Man River.” Academy: (310) 247-3000, Ext. 185; Museum: (213) 744-7432; Watts: (213) 752-7285; and UCLA: (310) 206-FILM.

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If ever there was a movie perfect for a midnight slot, it’s Mike Mendez’s gory yet darkly amusing and provocative allegory, “Real Killers,” which commences Friday and Saturday at 12 a.m. screenings at the Sunset 5. When San Quentin Death Row escapees, serial killer brothers Odessa and Kyle James (Dave Larsen and David Gunn, respectively), break into the secluded, suburban Ryan family home, they have no idea what they’re getting into. On the surface, Charles (C.T. Miller) and Rea (Damian Hoffer) are a typical couple, with two daughters, 17-year-old Jami (Nanette Bianchi) and 11-year-old Jenny (Renee Cohen), and a comfortable home.

But in a tour de force display of visual flair and taut storytelling, Mendez suggests with much corrosive wit and imagination that in this era of rampant violence and incessant sexual suggestiveness in the media, the American family could be mutating to the degree that they’re really not a whole lot different from guys like the James brothers. Mendez writes terrific outrageous dialogue for his excellent cast, who get a real workout under his intense, crackling direction. (213) 848-3500.

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Director Peter Byck and his co-producer-writer and star Derich Witliff’s tedious “Garbage” (Sunset 5, Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m.; Monica 4-Plex, Sept. 19 and 20 at 11 a.m.) is a rambling, laid-back attempt to combine, to borrow from its own press materials, “the constancy of trash and the persistence of dreams in everyday life all over the USA.” Witliff plays the wistful Jimmy the Janitor, an aspiring Louisville, Ky., singer-guitarist-composer-janitor-church cleaner seeking rock ‘n’ roll stardom as he wanders over the South and Southwest, eventually landing in a surprisingly Nirvana-like Los Angeles. Along the way, “Garbage” reports, not surprisingly, considerable bad news about environmental pollution and hazardous wastes, but meanders too much to hold attention and fails to mesh its message and Jimmy’s minimalist odyssey. Sunset 5, (213) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex, (310) 394-9741.