In 1966 United Artists released the film Cast a Giant Shadow, directed by Melville Shavelson. The film tells the purported true story of Mickey Marcus (played by Kirk Douglas), an American colonel from World War II who is recruited by the Haganah to aid them in their war with the Arabs following the partition of Palestine in 1948. Based on a best-selling biography of Marcus by Ted Berkman,Footnote 1 the film was produced by John Wayne's production company Batjac and featured an all-star cast including, in addition to Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Yul Brynner, Senta Berger, and Angie Dickinson, while John Wayne also appeared in a minor role as an American general. The film depicts Marcus, a lapsed Jew, at first refusing to aid the incipient Israeli army. However, he is ultimately unable to resist the lure of battle, at first assuming the role of a military adviser before eventually being appointed the first modern-day general of the Israeli military. After leading the Israelis to a glorious victory, Marcus is killed after being accidentally shot by a young Israeli soldier. This brief summary of the film's plot reveals the key difference between Cast a Giant Shadow and Otto Preminger's Exodus (1960) – undoubtedly the most notable Hollywood film ever produced about the birth of Israel; while the latter is best understood as a conscious attempt to celebrate the birth of the Jewish state through the reenactment of the expansion of the American frontier, the former is more explicitly concerned with valorizing American heroism. As this paper demonstrates, this valorization of American heroism in Cast a Giant Shadow is produced through the transposition of the mythic language of the American frontier onto the birth of Israel, which serves to articulate a coded message of pro-interventionism that speaks directly to the United States’ military presence in Vietnam, which had dramatically escalated throughout the first half of the 1960s.
Cast a Giant Shadow was not a commercial success. Director Melville Shavelson lamented that the public agreed with more critical reviewers “by staying away in droves.”Footnote 2 However, Cast a Giant Shadow constitutes an interesting case study due to the involvement of John Wayne in the film's production. By the time of the production of Cast a Giant Shadow Wayne had been a leading man in Hollywood for over twenty years, specializing in hyper-patriotic combat films and unadulterated paeans to America's frontier mythology. As a result, Wayne functioned as, to quote Lawrence H. Suid, “the model of the action hero for several generations of young males, representing the traditional American ideal of the anti-intellectual doer in contrast to the thinker.”Footnote 3 Moreover, Wayne's status as an archetypal American hero was further affirmed by his active engagement in the nation's politics. From the mid-1940s onwards Wayne served as one of Hollywood's most vocal and most visible Republicans, frequently railing against Communists and liberals, publicly endorsing archconservative Republican presidential candidates Richard Nixon (in 1960, 1968, and 1972) and Barry Goldwater (in 1964), while offering frequent and unabashed support for the United States’ military venture in Vietnam. Wayne's political activism functioned in concert with his status as the traditional ideal of the anti-intellectual doer to engender the image of Wayne as a mythical figure of idealized masculinity, embodying traditional American values of toughness, militarism, and rugged individualism. Consequently, at this point in his career Wayne functioned as, to quote Richard Slotkin, “a kind of folk hero, his name an idiomatic expression, a metaphoric formula or cliché that instantly invoked a well-recognized set of American heroic virtues – or, from a different perspective, inflated American pretensions.”Footnote 4 As evidence of Wayne's ideological resonance, Slotkin points to the string of cameo appearances Wayne made throughout the 1960s in films such as The Longest Day (Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, and Bernhard Wicki, 1962), the epic Western How the West Was Won (John Ford, Henry Hathaway, and George Marshall, 1962), and the biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (George Stevens, 1965), each of which feature Wayne functioning in an almost purely iconic manner in order to “invoke military and Western associations.”Footnote 5 Cast a Giant Shadow repeats this formula, with Wayne's screen image being deployed for the purpose of lending ideological clout to the championing of American interventionism in foreign conflicts.
Due to the fact that Wayne only appears on screen for a mere fifteen minutes, Cast a Giant Shadow has been generally overlooked in retrospective examinations of the legacy left by Wayne as both an actor and as an archconservative ideological icon. However, past analyses have failed to recognize that Cast a Giant Shadow is in many ways remarkably similar to two other Batjac productions, each of which starred and was directed by John Wayne: The Alamo (1960), the purported retelling of the Battle of the Alamo fought between Texan settlers and their supporters and Mexican troops under the command of the despotic general Santa Anna in 1836 during the Texas War of Independence, and the notoriously jingoistic Vietnam War film The Green Berets (1968). This paper establishes the kinship shared by these three films, thus demonstrating how Cast a Giant Shadow is best understood as the second installment of an unofficial trilogy of increasingly propagandistic pro-interventionist cinema specifically designed to articulate John Wayne's archconservative conception of the United States’ role in the Cold War world. Consequently, this paper elaborates our understanding of the ways in which John Wayne, to paraphrase Eric Bentley, put his art at the service of his beliefs.Footnote 6
AMERICAN INTERVENTIONISM IN VIETNAM
Film theorist Ismail Xavier posits that in consciously allegorical cinema, “the narrative texture places the spectator in an analytical posture while he or she is facing a coded message that is referred to an ‘other scene’ and not directly given on the diegetic level.”Footnote 7 In Cast a Giant Shadow the diegetic pertains to the outbreak of hostilities between Jews and Arabs following the declaration of Israeli statehood in 1948, and an American hero's intervention in the conflict on the side of the Israelis. Within the diegesis, there is no overt reference to the contemporaneous conflict in Vietnam. However, a cursory look at the political and cultural milieu in the years surrounding the release of the film reveals the difficulty in divorcing any cinematic treatment of American interventionism produced during this period from the ever-escalating situation in Vietnam.
The definitive event of this period was undoubtedly the election of John F. Kennedy as the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America in late 1960. The election of Kennedy was not only an event that would shape the course of American and indeed world history, but also one that symbolized the collective mood of a nation that had by now enjoyed a full generation of unparalleled power and prestige. In June of 1960 Kennedy accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party with an address that invoked the rhetoric of America's frontier mythology. Kennedy declared that the United States stood on the precipice of a “New Frontier.” Lying beyond this “New Frontier” were “uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.”Footnote 8 With these words Kennedy was making an explicit appeal to the idealized notions of courage and leadership that ostensibly defined the American people, foreshadowing what would be his administration's fundamental rejection of the conservatism of the Eisenhower presidency in the pursuit of an age of heretofore unseen national greatness.
In his inauguration speech Kennedy made the ambitious pledge to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” He called upon a “new generation of Americans” to face up to its “destiny,” to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” and to commit its energies to the “long twilight struggle” against “the worldwide forces of oppression and poverty.” Kennedy would lead the charge in this long twilight struggle with a foreign policy in aid of the “containment” of Communism that was significantly more aggressive than that of his predecessor. In accordance with the rhetoric of the New Frontier administration, the far corners of the Third World would fall under the sphere of influence of the once staunchly isolationist United States, who would now embrace the role of beneficent interventionist power. Furthermore, in his inauguration speech Kennedy declared,
To those people in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required – not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right …
Crucially, Kennedy strove to portray this endeavor as one of altruistic “nation building” rather than old-fashioned imperialism, stating, “To those new States whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny.”Footnote 9
The Kennedy administration's execution of a more aggressive foreign policy in pursuit of the containment of Communism manifested itself most conspicuously in Vietnam. For Kennedy, Vietnam represented a microcosm of the broader global struggle between the forces of freedom and the so-called “Communist conspiracy” in which it was the United States’ moral duty to lead the fight. Moreover, Vietnam constituted a crucible of American strength. As a Senator, Kennedy described Vietnam as not only “a proving ground for democracy in Asia,” but also “a test of American responsibility and determination”; years later, as President, Kennedy would confide to James Reston of the New York Times, “we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.”Footnote 10 Under Kennedy, American troop presence in Vietnam escalated dramatically, with levels of “military advisers” tripling in 1961 and again in 1962, and with said “advisers” taking a far more active role in the execution of the counterinsurgency against the Communists.Footnote 11
Following the assassination of Kennedy in November 1963, Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency, and American involvement in Vietnam would continue to escalate. Following the so-called “Gulf of Tonkin incident” in August 1964, in which the United States National Security Agency falsely claimed that an American ship had been the subject of an unprovoked attack by North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats, Congress passed a resolution authorizing a massive bombing campaign of the North.Footnote 12 This was soon followed by the deployment of American ground troops in Vietnam, which signalled a complete takeover of the war effort against the Communists by the United States. Here it is crucial to note that polls taken in early 1965 indicated that the public overwhelmingly favoured Johnson's actions following the Gulf of Tonkin incident.Footnote 13
As was the case under Kennedy, the Johnson administration saw Vietnam as a litmus test for American power. At the time of the American takeover of the war in 1964–65 the Johnson administration judged that the American stake in a victory in Vietnam was more than 70 percent “symbolic,” and that preserving American “national honor as a guarantor” was far more important than helping the South Vietnamese government to survive.Footnote 14 General Maxwell D. Taylor, American ambassador to South Vietnam from July 1964 to July 1965, effectively summed up this attitude by arguing shortly after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, “if we leave Vietnam with our tail between our legs, the consequences of this defeat for the rest of Asia, Africa, and Latin America would be disastrous.”Footnote 15 Conversely, successful completion of the mission to eradicate the Communist element in Vietnam would validate the United States’ self-appointed status as the benevolent protector of the world's oppressed.
HOLLYWOOD INTERVENTIONISM
The championing of American interventionism that lies at the heart of Cast a Giant Shadow is attested by the plethora of divergences the film makes from Ted Berkman's biography of Mickey Marcus. In Berkman's biography Marcus becomes involved in the Israeli fight for independence after a representative of the Israeli government employs Marcus, who is now working as a lawyer, to find someone to advise and assist the Israeli military in their imminent war with the region's Arabs. After a fruitless search, Marcus assumes the role himself. At this point in the book much has already been made of Marcus's Judaism, with particular emphasis placed on the bullying he suffered as a Jewish youth growing up on the streets of New York.Footnote 16 The book also makes the point that Marcus's acceptance of the mission to help bring about a Jewish homeland is indelibly linked to his own very personal understanding of Jewish suffering; for instance, in his attempts to assuage his wife's disappointment at the revelation that he intends to go to Palestine, Marcus remarks that the death of Adolf Hitler merely left the job “half-done.”Footnote 17
Conversely, in the film, Marcus's Judaism, while never explicitly denied, is thoroughly downplayed as a motivating factor in his rush to assist the Israeli military. Instead Marcus is at heart a protector and a liberator whose motivation is positioned as emanating from an insatiable desire to fight for the liberty of the world's downtrodden. The film's marginalization of the protagonist's Judaism is established in the opening scene in which a Haganah agent (played by James Donald) approaches Marcus on the streets of New York. Whereas in Berkman's biography Marcus is asked to find someone to fill the role of adviser to the Israeli military, in the film the Haganah agent targets Marcus specifically. The agent introduces himself as a representative of “the world's youngest, worst-trained, least-equipped and most-outnumbered army.” He goes on to quote the extreme anti-Jewish rhetoric of Ibn Saud, the founder of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (“There are 50 million Arabs. What does it matter if we lose 10 million to kill all the Jews? The price is worth it”), and Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (“I declare a holy war. Murder them. Murder them all”), each of which firmly establishes Israel as a besieged nation fighting for its survival. The agent proceeds to solicit the help of Marcus by appealing to his Judaism, telling him that Israel is “his country,” only to have Marcus refute him with the words, “I'm an American. Last time I was in Temple was when I was thirteen.” The Israeli then attempts to appeal to his Americanness, asking him, “What is it you say in your schools? Liberty and justice for all – is it only for all of you?” It is the Haganah agent's invocation of the American Pledge of Allegiance that ultimately convinces Marcus of the sanctity of the mission, as demonstrated by that scene's transition into a scene in which Marcus tells his wife (played by Angie Dickinson) that he is set to leave for Palestine to take up the role of “military adviser” to the Jewish underground forces. Crucially, Marcus is here positioned as fulfilling an advisory role similar to that ostensibly played by the United States’ military in Vietnam prior to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the subsequent deployment of American ground troops. When his wife asks, “Why there and why you?” Marcus refers not to his own Judaism, but to the fact that he knows “a great deal about the business of killing and they've been killed by experts – someone has to help them fight back” (emphasis added). Marcus's acquiescence to the Israelis’ request thus appears to emerge principally out of an innate sense of repulsion at the knowledge of injustice being perpetrated against a weak and vulnerable people. In essence, Douglas's Marcus personifies Kennedy's plea for the selfless New Frontiersman who “pays any price, bears any burden, meets any hardship, supports any friend, opposes any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.”Footnote 18
Upon his arrival in Palestine, Marcus (operating under the nom de guerre Mickey Stone in order not to officially involve the United States military in the operation) is distinguished not only by his professionalism and strategic know-how, but also by a confidence and fighting spirit that is unmatched by any of the Israelis under his command. The superiority of Marcus is frequently conveyed through the miseenscène that predominantly features the rugged, well-built Douglas standing up, often in the centre of the frame, while the comparatively frail Israelis – most of whom are played by actors who would be relatively unknown by the American audience – passively sit.
While the Israeli brains trust incessantly bemoan their inferior manpower and weaponry and speak of merely holding territory, Marcus implores them to always be on the attack, at one point telling them to “stop thinking like losers,” stating that there “have been enough Masadas in this country” (a reference to the mass suicide of Jewish rebels in the Jewish fortress of Masada during the final stages of the Jewish revolt against Roman rule c.73–74 CE). Here Marcus demonstrates all of the values that Rupert Wilkinson identifies in American Tough: The Tough-Guy Tradition and American Character (1972) as being central to American culture's definitions of toughness – namely “mastery, competence, informal assertiveness, and self-defense.”Footnote 19 Marcus is established as what Wilkinson terms “the ‘can-do guy,’ the guy who delivers, who gets things done,” and who is “not afraid to face down rivals and aggressors.”Footnote 20 During a raid on a British outpost, despite only serving as an “adviser” and being told by the Israelis he is advising that the mission is too dangerous and that he should not participate, Marcus heroically charges into the battle, single-handedly taking down an armed Arab soldier and dragging a fallen comrade to safety while Israeli soldiers flee to safety. This scene exhibits Marcus's inimitable courage and tenacious fighting spirit. Moreover, it is reflective of the contemporaneous reality in Vietnam whereby the Americans were officially operating in an advisory capacity, but were in actuality leading the anti-Communist forces. Furthermore, in another instance that reaffirms the superior courage and fighting spirit of Marcus, later in the film an Israeli unit retreats after sustaining only two casualties, outraging Marcus in the process. Although Shavelson would claim that the film “counters the myth that Jews walked to the gas chambers because they didn't know how to fight,”Footnote 21 the reality is that the film shows the Israelis as a vulnerable people in desperate need of American assistance.
Marcus's superior qualities are eventually confirmed when the Israeli Prime Minister, Jacob Zion (played by Luther Adler) – a character who is clearly based on David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel – gives him the title of “Aluf,” which roughly translates to “General.” Not long after being appointed “the first general of the army of Israel in 2,000 years,” Marcus finally refers to the Israeli army as “us.” This comes after almost two hours of Marcus making clear distinctions between himself and the Israelis under his command. Patricia Erens argues that in this scene Marcus “suddenly realizes where he belongs,” and that he at last “understands the root of his compulsive need to move from war to war.”Footnote 22 However, not long after Marcus expresses his kinship with his Israeli comrades there is a scene that in no way appears in Berkman's biography in which Marcus declares to his Israeli lover Magda Simon (played by Senta Berger) that he is returning to his wife in America. This scene undermines the character's earlier identification with the Jews of Israel and reiterates that Marcus is, above all else, an American soldier selflessly fighting for the liberty of a foreign nation. At the end of the scene Marcus is killed after being shot by an Israeli sentry who does not recognize him and calls out for Marcus to identify himself in Hebrew, a language Marcus does not speak. The film ends with Marcus dying a martyr for the Zionist cause in a fiery affirmation of his status as a patriotic American who is fundamentally not at home in the Holy Land.
The manner in which Cast a Giant Shadow achieves narrative closure signals the film's status as a pseudo-western. Throughout the scene in which Marcus tells his Israeli lover that he is returning to America, Marcus evokes the classic cowboy hero who, as noted by Peter Homans, invariably “forfeits any opportunity to renounce his ‘beyond the town’ origin and destiny.”Footnote 23 Furthermore, by ending with the martyrdom of Marcus, the film demonstrates its kinship with the cycle of gunfighter westerns that enjoyed a significant degree of popularity in the 1950s.Footnote 24 In these films a selfless, chivalrous gunfighter would face off against seemingly insurmountable forces of evil, usually in defence of an inherently weak and vulnerable people. According to Slotkin, the heroes of the gunfighter western are defined by a “professionalism in the arts of violence” and a fundamental “characterological difference or alienation from their communities.”Footnote 25 The locus classicus of this cycle is undoubtedly Shane (George Stevens, 1953), in which a mysterious figure by the name of Shane (played by Alan Ladd) rides into a frontier community populated by honest, hardworking pioneer folk and single-handedly rescues them from a ruthlessly terroristic baron, before riding off into the sunset with what are presumed to be fatal wounds sustained in battle with the baron's henchman. In Shane the eponymous gunfighter mysteriously emerges out of the wilderness as if sent by Providence to protect the settlers of a land sanctified throughout the genre as a New Canaan for “God's Chosen People.” In Cast a Giant Shadow Mickey Marcus, having been transported from the United States to an Israel that is populated by besieged settlers, similarly appears to the burgeoning community which he enters as a mysterious stranger, well schooled in the violent arts, having been sent to protect God's other “Chosen People” in the literal Canaan. As noted by Slotkin, Shane's “motives for helping the farmers are chivalric and romantic.”Footnote 26 Moreover, they are “unique and arise from no visible history or social background, they appear to be expressions of his nature, signs of a nobility which is independent of history, like the attributes of a ‘higher race’.”Footnote 27 In Cast a Giant Shadow Marcus is similarly presented as a selfless American interventionist who, in coming to the aid of a besieged and vulnerable people ostensibly fighting for freedom and liberty, is also exhibiting the inherent nobility of a member of a “higher race.” Finally, like Shane, Marcus sacrifices himself for a society to which he will never belong. As Slotkin says of Shane, Marcus
is never part of the community, and his superior values are not seen as belonging to the community. He is an aristocrat of violence, an alien from a more glamorous world, who is better than those he helps and is finally not accountable to those for whom he sacrifices himself.Footnote 28
Through its kinship with the gunfighter film, Cast a Giant Shadow constructs Israel as the quintessential New Frontier. As a result, the cinematic rendering of Israel enables not only the unadulterated celebration of frontier mythology, but also the valorization of traditional notions of hard masculinity and old-fashioned movie heroism.
The film's endorsement of American interventionism is also conveyed through the character of General Mike Randolph, an invention of the film who is played by Wayne. Randolph is introduced in a flashback as the leader of the squadron, of which Marcus is a member, which liberates the Dachau concentration camp at the end of World War II. This scene plays a dual role in both establishing the immensity of Jewish suffering that preceded the birth of Israel, and affirming the image of the United States as a benevolent power by perpetuating the notion of Americans as the true vanquishers of Nazism. Later in the film, after Marcus has returned from his first excursion to Palestine, he and Randolph have an exchange in which Marcus pleads the Israeli case, claiming that they are helpless and “surrounded by five Arab nations ready to shove them into the Mediterranean.” Randolph responds by derisively asking him, “Then why did you come back?” Randolph then implores him to “stand up and be counted,” effectively encouraging Marcus to carry on his fight for Israeli independence. In a telling observation, Time magazine described Wayne's performance as “an uncanny impersonation of President Johnson,” the man who, only two years prior, had dramatically escalated the United States’ military involvement in Vietnam.Footnote 29
It is entirely fitting that it is Wayne's character that explicitly articulates the sanctity of Marcus's mission. Although he only appears on screen for some fifteen minutes, it is Wayne who is most responsible for the film's ideology. In the ironically titled How to Make a Jewish Movie (1971), an amusing recounting of the film's production, director Melville Shavelson details how he was finding it impossible to secure funding for the project, with Hollywood producers frequently asking him, “Who would want to see a picture about a Jewish general?”Footnote 30 Shavelson's response was to craft a treatment that told the story of “a tough Jewish soldier who helped save the cradle of Judea by teaching a Jewish army how to fight a Jewish war that had nothing to do with Jews.”Footnote 31 Instead the focus would be on what Shavelson termed the protagonist's Kennedy-esque “inbred American hatred for injustice,” and his willingness to “fight for any underdog who came to him and asked.”Footnote 32 Shavelson took his treatment to Wayne, then the biggest star in Hollywood, whose commitment would guarantee the support of a major studio. Wayne's star-image ostensibly exuded the “inbred American hatred for injustice” more than that of any other prominent Hollywood actor, and he responded to Shavelson's overtures by telling the director that the treatment for Cast a Giant Shadow was “the most American story” that he had ever heard.Footnote 33 Crucially, Wayne saw in Marcus's story a means through which to champion America's image as a beneficent interventionist power at a time when America's presence in Vietnam was becoming increasingly controversial. According to Shavelson, Wayne told him,
Everybody's knockin’ the United States today, claiming we're sendin’ in troops all over the world to knock over some little country where we've got no right to be. They've forgotten who we are and what we've done. At a time like this, we need to remind them of how we helped the littlest country of all get its independence. How an American army officer gave his life to do it.Footnote 34
Wayne agreed to produce the film under the auspices of Batjac, which helped to secure financial backing and distribution from United Artists. In addition, Wayne secured a coproducer role for his son Michael Wayne, and also recruited Kirk Douglas to play the role of Marcus.Footnote 35 Meanwhile, with Wayne now firmly in control of the picture the story proceeded to evolve from one of a Jewish American soldier's fight for Israeli sovereignty to an unadulterated paean to American interventionism. Wayne is reported to have said to Mary St. John, his long-time private secretary, “Shavelson is a nice fellow, but the film is a passion to him, a baby, a labor of love, a crusade. I'll be damned if I'm going to give free rein to a Jewish true believer making the movie of his lifetime with my money.”Footnote 36 The subsequent shift in tone was so profound that Shavelson later remarked, “Duke [John Wayne] was so high on the Americanness of the picture that Kirk, who is of course a Jew, said to him, ‘Don't forget that Mickey Marcus was Jewish.’ And Duke said, ‘Jesus Christ was Jewish too, but he didn't go to West Point’.”Footnote 37 In what is a further confirmation of the film's transformation once in the hands of Wayne, Shavelson asserts that all of the marketing for the film “eliminated all mention of the nation of Israel, the War of Liberation, the Jews, or Colonel Mickey Marcus.”Footnote 38
THE POLITICAL CINEMA OF JOHN WAYNE
Wayne's stated reasons for doing Cast a Giant Shadow mirror those that were behind Batjac's production of both The Alamo and The Green Berets. Through an examination of the similarities that Cast a Giant Shadow shares with these productions, we can better understand the film as a conscious celebration of American interventionism. The Alamo was released in 1960 in the midst of that year's presidential election. The film stars John Wayne as Davy Crockett in the familiar role of “a kind of frontier everyman who disdains formal hierarchy but who is readily recognized as one of nature's noblemen.”Footnote 39 Crockett leads a small cadre of Tennesseans who have valiantly volunteered to aid the people of Texas in their fight for freedom. At the point in history in which the film is set, Texas was a part of Mexico rather than the United States of America, and thus the film centres on American heroes selflessly defending the liberty of people who belong to a separate nation, as in Cast a Giant Shadow.
The Alamo was a deeply personal project for Wayne, who was not only the film's star but also its director. Meanwhile his son Michael was associate producer, fulfilling a role similar to the one that he would later play in the production of Cast a Giant Shadow. In promoting the film Wayne declared that he was aiming it at “all who have an interest in a thing called freedom,” because “I think we've all been going soft, taking freedom for granted.” He viewed Texas's struggle for independence not only as “one of the most heroic moments in American history,” but also as a “metaphor of America.”Footnote 40 Such ideals reveal themselves in the film's often preachy dialogue, such as when Wayne, as Crockett, pontificates about the sanctity of republicanism with the following eulogy:
Republic. I like the sound of the word. It means people can live free, talk free, go or come, buy or sell, be drunk or sober, however they choose. Some words give you a feeling. Republic is one of those words that makes me tight in the throat – the same tightness a man gets when his baby takes his first step or his first baby shaves and makes his first sound as a man. Some words can give you a feeling that makes your heart warm. Republic is one of those words.
Moreover, Wayne frequently aligned the narrative of the film to the rhetoric of the Cold War and the supposed necessity for American leadership in the fight against Communist aggression; “These are ‘perilous times,’ he felt, ‘when the eyes of the world are on us,’ and ‘we must sell America to countries threatened with Communist domination.”Footnote 41 Here Wayne is explicitly appealing to the same ideal of American exceptionalism as would Kennedy in his inauguration speech just three months after the release of The Alamo. Wayne also claimed to hope that “something more than profits will result from The Alamo,” and that “the battle fought there will remind people today that the price of liberty and freedom is not cheap.”Footnote 42 Again, the film explicitly articulates these ideals through its dialogue. For instance, when one of Crockett's men expresses a desire to return home based on the fact that “It ain't our oxen being gored,” Crockett convinces him to stay on and fight with the words, “Figure this. A fellow gets in the habit of gorin’ oxes, it whets his appetite. He may come up north and gore yours.” Crockett's retort is not merely a clear imploration of the supposed necessity to meet aggression with force, but it serves as a crude colloquial summation of the so-called “domino theory,” which speculated that once one state in a particular region came under the influence of Communism then the surrounding countries would naturally follow, and which served to justify the need for American intervention across the world throughout the Cold War era.
Five years after the release of The Alamo, and only one year before the release of Cast a Giant Shadow, Wayne purchased the film rights to Robin Moore's best-selling Vietnam War novel The Green Berets (1965). Released in 1967, The Green Berets not only featured Wayne as its star but also would be the only project besides The Alamo for which Wayne would receive a directorial credit. Like both The Alamo and Cast a Giant Shadow, The Green Berets was produced under the auspices of Batjac and featured his son Michael as a producer. Moreover, The Green Berets would explicitly mythologize the United States as a chivalrously interventionist redeemer nation. However, unlike The Alamo and Cast a Giant Shadow, The Green Berets is entirely devoid of allegorical pretensions. Instead, it constitutes Hollywood's only attempt to directly address America's involvement in Vietnam during the period in which the war was being fought. Whereas Wayne had previously deployed both the legend of the Alamo and the outbreak of Arab–Israeli hostilities to allegorically champion his own right-wing interpretation of America's role in the Cold War world, The Green Berets served as a means through which Wayne unobtrusively articulated his archconservative views regarding the United States’ presence in Vietnam, which he equated to America's opposition to Nazism in World War II.Footnote 43 Wayne's fiercely pro-interventionist ethos and propagandistic intentions are made unequivocally clear in a letter he wrote to President Johnson in which he appealed for the Defense Department's cooperation in the making of the film, explaining that the aim of the film was to “inspire a patriotic attitude on the part of fellow Americans.”Footnote 44 With regard to Vietnam, Wayne said it was “extremely important that not only the people of the United States but those all over the world should know why it is necessary for us to be there … The most effective way to accomplish this is through the motion picture medium.”Footnote 45 Wayne insisted that he could make the “kind of picture that will help our cause throughout the world.”Footnote 46 Jack Valenti, then special assistant to President Johnson (and soon-to-be president of the Motion Picture Association of America), reportedly told Johnson, “Wayne's politics [are] wrong, but in so far as Vietnam is concerned, his views are right. If he made the picture he would be saying the things we want said.”Footnote 47 Consequently, Wayne received the governmental assistance he coveted.
In line with Wayne's simplistic view of the world – replying to a question about his personal politics Wayne once famously declared, “They tell me everything isn't black and white. Well, I say, why the hell not?” – The Green Berets presents what was a profoundly complex conflict in absurdly Manichaean terms.Footnote 48 It is an agonizingly reductive “us-and-them” tale in which the Americans are courageous good guys who defend helpless Vietnamese women and children from the barbarous Viet Cong in one scene, and then bring the ebulliently grateful villagers toys and medicine in the next. As in The Alamo and Cast a Giant Shadow, characters frequently pontificate about the righteousness of America's role in the war; indeed, the film begins with a scene in which a soldier responds to a journalist's question regarding the Vietnamese desire for American assistance by saying, “They need us … and they want us.” Wayne even challenges the growing opposition to the war in America through the character of a dovish American journalist whom Wayne openly mocks, and who later converts to the cause after being exposed to the savagery of the Viet Cong.
Crucially, The Green Berets presents the conflict as little more than a reenactment of the racial warfare that typified the expansion of the American frontier. The film's depiction of the Viet Cong clearly draws on traditional Hollywood representations of Native Americans; for instance, the Viet Cong are shown attacking Americans with crossbows, and when they take the American base they wail like screen Indians. Producer Michael Wayne summed up the film's debt to the western in the following terms:
We're not making a political picture; we're making a picture about a bunch of right guys … Cowboys and Indians … The Americans are the good guys and the Viet Cong are the bad guys … Maybe we shouldn't have destroyed all those Indians, but when you are making a picture, the Indians are the bad guys.Footnote 49
Furthermore, as noted by John Belton, the climactic scene of the film re-creates the climax of The Alamo, in which the camp is surrounded and besieged by the enemy; the only difference is that, on this occasion, the Americans win the battle, thus “providing an ideologically correct, upbeat ending to a downbeat Western myth.”Footnote 50 In what is an effective encapsulation of Wayne's conception of Vietnam as a New Frontier that needs to be tamed by the white man and made safe for Western civilization, the camp that houses the American Special Forces unit is identified as “Dodge City,” evoking the famous frontier town of the Old West in which the famous lawman Wyatt Earp, among many others, once lived and operated.
Both The Alamo and The Green Berets, in their unabashed valorization of American interventionism, exemplify Eric Bentley's claim that John Wayne put his art at the service of his beliefs.Footnote 51 Similarly, Cast a Giant Shadow transforms the story of Mickey Marcus and his role in the birth of the state of Israel in order to align it with Wayne's personal ideals. However, it is not merely the marginalization of Marcus's Judaism and the invention of the jingoistic character played by Wayne that reflects this transformation. The film contains a number of other major divergences from Berkman's biography of Marcus that evoke both The Alamo and The Green Berets, and in so doing serve to position the film as an explicit celebration of American interventionism. For instance, the film's construction of the Arabs of Palestine is distinctly reminiscent of traditional screen representations of Native Americans, directly mirroring the ways in which The Green Berets represents the North Vietnamese. This manner of representation is established in the first scene following Marcus's arrival in Palestine in which Marcus gets on a bus that includes amongst its passengers a cross-section of (Jewish) Israeli society – a businessman, an elderly woman, children, male and female soldiers. Eventually the bus reaches a part of the city that is teeming with armed Arabs who bombard it with rifle fire, wounding a young woman in the process. This sequence recalls a scene in the classic western Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) (perhaps not coincidentally, starring John Wayne in one of his earliest major roles) in which a cross-section of nineteenth century (white) American society travels through hostile Indian country and is eventually raided by Apaches. As a result, Cast a Giant Shadow can be seen as echoing some of the more traditional formulations of American frontier mythology, in which, as Slotkin notes, “the myth of ‘savage war’ blames Native Americans as instigators of a war of extermination.”Footnote 52 This scene sets the tone for all future confrontations between the Israelis, who are distinctly personalized and through whom the audience witness all of the events contained within the narrative, and the Arabs, who are nameless, faceless villains with essentially no sense of individuality, just like the Native American savages of the classic western.
The film also includes a sequence that is absent from Berkman's biography of Marcus that is a variation of the rape/rescue trope that is so central to countless captivity narratives set on the American frontier. This sequence begins with the Israelis transporting a convoy through hostile Arab territory. Magda, Marcus's Israeli lover, volunteers to drive one of the vehicles. During the operation her truck breaks down, and upon realizing that she is alone amongst a sea of Arabs Marcus shouts, “Come on, Magda!” Suddenly, what seems like hundreds of Arabs are cackling and tormenting her by screaming, “Come on, Magda!” Meanwhile, the audience are subjected to a succession of tight close-ups on a procession of salivating rapacious Arabs in a scene that epitomizes Edward Said's claim that Hollywood has traditionally depicted the Arab as being “an oversexed degenerate, capable, it is true, of cleverly devious intrigues, but essentially sadistic, treacherous, low.”Footnote 53 To recall what Mikhail Bakhtin conceptualized as “genre memory,” for an audience raised on Puritanical frontier mythology the implication is obvious: Magda is to be subjected to what The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915) frames as a “fate worse than death” – a sexual assault at the hands of dark-skinned savages – as were countless white victims of Indian barbarism throughout a half-century of Hollywood westerns.Footnote 54
Magda is as discernibly aware of this inevitability as any member of the audience, and as a result she goes into shock. Meanwhile, the Israeli character played by Yul Brynner with whom Marcus is riding tells him that the situation is far too dangerous for them to stop. The Israeli does not possess the requisite gallantry a rescue attempt would demand. Marcus, the classic American “can-do guy” who gets things done and is unafraid to face down rivals and aggressors, courageously extricates himself from the vehicle and single-handedly goes off to save Magda. In a line of dialogue that effectively encapsulates the film's construction of America as a benevolent interventionist power rescuing the downtrodden of the world from their barbarous oppressors, Magda pleads, “Help me, Mickey! Help me!” The scene then fades out and Marcus is next seen escorting a catatonic Magda to a doctor, implying the success of his rescue mission. With Magda's safety secured, Kirk Douglas's Marcus emerges as a modern-day successor to the self-willed Indian-fighter legend made famous by the likes of Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, and, it must be said, the film's producer, John Wayne.
Here it is instructive to note that similarly vulnerable female characters appear throughout the Wayne oeuvre. For instance, one of the subplots of The Alamo centres on a relationship between Davy Crockett and a young Mexican woman (played by Linda Cristal) whom Crockett rescues from a forced marriage. Two variations of this character also appear in The Green Berets: one is a beautiful Vietnamese woman who is employed by the Americans as a honey trap to ensnare a lascivious Viet Cong general; the other is a young Vietnamese girl who is found dead after being gang-raped by Viet Cong soldiers.Footnote 55 Moreover, neither The Alamo nor The Green Berets features a strong, native-born male character opposite the strong, decisive American characters played by Wayne and Douglas respectively. As a result, the weak, vulnerable women who are in desperate need of rescue by the hypermasculine Americans serve as the principal representative of their respective nation. This dynamic can be understood as a subtle variation on what Ella Shohat terms “gendered metaphors” of national identity. According to Shohat, gendered metaphors interweave colonial and patriarchal discourses for the purpose of legitimating European dominion of the Third World.Footnote 56 As Shohat argues, from its earliest days of film production Hollywood has deployed gendered metaphors in its representations of the Third World; notable examples cited by Shohat include Intolerance (D. W. Griffith, 1916) and Cleopatra (Cecil B. DeMille, 1934), both produced during the age of empire building, and both of which present the Orient as a feminized “scene of carnal delights” awaiting European/American penetration.Footnote 57 In the case of The Alamo, The Green Berets, and Cast a Giant Shadow, each of which was produced and exhibited against the backdrop of increasing American presence in Vietnam, female characters are employed as gendered metaphors to instead position the Third World as a proverbial damsel in distress for the purpose of legitimating the United States’ self-appointed status as the world's defender of freedom and liberty.
CONCLUSION
Rather than unabashedly glorifying the birth of the Jewish state in a manner akin to that of Exodus, Cast a Giant Shadow constructs Israelis as a besieged, freedom-loving people crying out for valiant Americans to help them build a nation of their own in a manner that distinctly echoes John Wayne's construction of the Texans in The Alamo and also the South Vietnamese in The Green Berets. In so doing, Cast a Giant Shadow articulates the ideology of the New Frontier by reimagining its hero as a Special Forces-type figure who embodies the United States’ supposed eagerness to come to the rescue of the world's downtrodden and oppressed.
Apart from the film's functioning as an overt expression of Wayne's political ideology, what makes Cast a Giant Shadow a rather unique entry in the annals of Hollywood is the time of its production and exhibition. The half-decade that followed the release of Cast a Giant Shadow was a period of tremendous tumult in the United States typified by increasing opposition to the war in Vietnam, race riots, campus demonstrations, political assassinations, and the emergence of second-wave feminism. As a result, such chauvinistic celebrations of American interventionism would largely disappear from view, not to be seen again until the era of Ronald Reagan and John Rambo. Concomitant with this profound shift in the social and political life of the United States was a radical altering of both the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East and Israel's image in the United States as a result of the Jewish state winning an emphatic victory in the Six Day War of 1967 against a coalition of Arab nations. By virtue of this constellation of developments, Cast a Giant Shadow constitutes not only one of the last films produced by Hollywood during this era to unequivocally valorize American military interventionism, but the last time that Hollywood would depict Israel as a damsel-in-distress nation requiring the assistance of the United States.
