(Those ellipses are in the title. It's not my way of being mysterious.)
Why was I watching this movie on a Thursday night, the informal first night of the weekend, when I'm generally trying to unwind with something lighter? Something shorter than 174 minutes?
Or more to the point, why am I even watching this 1966 epic from director-star John Huston in the first place?
Well it's milestone time again here on The Audient. And in this case, I didn't even write my usual preview post a few weeks ago to let you know it was coming.
The Bible: In the Beginning ... was the 6,000th movie I've ever seen. (Pause for a moment to acknowledge the usual potential inaccuracies in my list, but as far as I know, I've seen 6,000 movies.)
Once I'd hit 5,999, I had to watch this movie next, whenever that opportunity arose, and regardless of what other apple carts it may have upset in terms of my normal viewing patterns. I was able to control it to the extent that I made sure the moment arrived before the beginning of the proper weekend.
It comes just 1,379 days since I watched my 5,000th movie, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, on February 8, 2018. So using some quick math, that means I've been averaging a new movie every 1.379 days since then. I can't swear that's a record but it seems likely. (Might as well check ... nope, the previous thousand took only 1,271 days. Kind of a relief to know I'm slowing down rather than speeding up.)
As you would guess from the previous title (and from Mr. 3000 back in 2010, before I deviated for a classic for #4,000 with Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans in 2014), I'm all about the theme for these milestones.
If you haven't figured out the theme for watching a biblical epic, it's that according to the Bible, the earth is approximately 6,000 years old. While I personally think that's a bunch of malarkey -- just ask the dinosaur bones -- it does make it easy to choose one of the biblically themed movies I haven't seen, and not eventually settle on something lame like The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.
My first thought was to watch Cecille B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, all three hours and 40 minutes of it. I can watch a 220-minute film every thousand movies.
But then I thought, although that covers the Bible angle of the theme, it tends not to emphasize the supposed age of the earth that I am celebrating with this milestone. So I googled further and found this movie, which was not even on my radar, but which ticks many of the same boxes as DeMille's epic, while also being 45 minutes shorter.
The Bible covers the first 22 chapters of the Book of Genesis, dramatizing some Bible stories I knew pretty well but had never actually seen on screen before. For the first half before the intermission, I found myself comparing this material to what I saw less than ten years ago in Darren Aronofsky's Noah. The Noah story -- with Huston himself as Noah -- takes up a good 45 minutes, leaving slightly less than that for the creation, Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel. It covers these stories at a long, languid and sometimes trying pace, though my familiarity with them -- and the comparative earliness of the hour -- kept me engaged.
The second half was a different story. By this point it was the wrong side of 10:30 and we were entering narrative territory that was far less known to me. After a very short bit about the Tower of Babel, so short that I wondered at the decision to erect a set for it given the amount of screen time it gets, the second half focuses exclusively on stories that are an offshoot of the character of Abraham (George C. Scott). For some reason I have failed to learn much about this portion of Genesis -- I suppose, that reason being that I am not religious and only remember what I do know from Sunday school. But that made it far less easy to follow and far less easy to care.
Suffice it to say, I finished at about 1:20 a.m. after a number of short to mid-range naps.
My overall impression of the film is solidly favorable, even though it feels like something out of a time capsule. Huston uses a couple clever techniques to help visualize his themes while not rendering them absurd due to the technical inability to stage some of the grander moments. I was a bit disappointed that there was no way to get Noah's ark on anything that looked vaguely like an ocean -- it's a lot more clearly a flooded sound stage. But much of the animal wrangling seems genuine, and it was fun to watch Huston's slightly loopy take on Noah as he interacts with those beasts of all size and shape.
The opening creation sequence reminded me of something out a Disney nature documentary of the time. Somehow more than ten minutes of this film passes before we even meet Adam. The introduction of Adam is a bit paltry, as he appears by degrees out of hills of sand that steadily take the shape of a man. This itself would not have been such a deficient way of doing it, but it is regrettably accompanied by a crescendo in the score that should be saved for a big reveal. In this instance, for another two minutes after the crescendo, we still can't tell that this is becoming the shape of a man, except that God, our narrator (also Huston), just told us.
I found myself going down some internet rabbit holes as I was watching. I became obsessed with the question of how Cain, after being cast out following the murder of his brother, ended up finding a wife and creating the lineage of awful people who all eventually die in the flood. If Cain and Abel were the first two (and as far as we see, only) children of the first two human beings, how was there anyone other than his own mother for Cain to procreate with?
This one site I found explained that Cain and Abel are not the only two, and perhaps not even the first two, of Adam and Eve's children. In fact, the Bible says nothing about how old they are when Cain kills Abel, so they could already be in their fifties or something, and their parents could have already had a litter of other children. (People lived hundreds of years in the Bible and remained capable of reproducing for most of that time.) I had to laugh a bit when this site said it was possible there were as many as 32,000 people on earth when Cain killed Abel and went in search of a wife, all just from the multiplying handiwork of Adam and Eve and their offspring. (The site also explains away possible genetic disorders from incest by talking about the perfect genes the first two humans were born -- that is, created -- with. Apparently brothers could sleep with sisters because the genetic disorders multiplied down through the generations would not yet be present.)
I also celebrated the appearance of Seth, the other child of Adam and Eve who is named in the Bible, though he is only mentioned in narration, not actually appearing on screen. The reason for my celebration is that I temporarily had the nickname Seth on my college ultimate frisbee team, which was due entirely to the fact that I mentioned the third son of Adam and Eve and no one else on the team had even heard of him. A very small amount of research obviously proved me correct, but this small bit of doubt lives on in me, so I always appreciate the external validation.
I won't get into more details because that's not really the type of post this is.
It felt like a useful movie to have seen and a good movie to mark this milestone. But after two straight nights of movies that ran longer than two-and-a-half hours, I'm really going to need something of a more snackable length as I do finally unwind on Friday night.
I have no idea what will make a good theme for my 7,000th viewing, but fortunately, I've got what I hope is more than 1,379 more days to figure that out.
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