It's been more than 20 years since I read Leon Uris' Exodus, but I remember it as being an all-time great novel.
Unfortunately, it has been just 20 hours since I finished watching the Otto Preminger movie version, and I remember it as being very very long. And extremely terrible.
Apparently, movie makers in the 1960s hadn't quite mastered the concepts of editing (three and a half hours!?!?) or sound engineering (I don't know where the microphones were positioned during all of the indoor scenes, but my best guess was near a vacuum cleaner).
Or special effects. In one scene, a bomb explodes outside a prison wall, and the resulting hole is a perfect rectangle.
Or dialogue, for that matter. I might be off by a word or two here, but I swear to Oprah H. Winfrey that Paul Newman, as Ari, actually said this to Eva Marie Saint, as Kitty: "A year is a long time in the life of a beautiful woman." Well, yeah, no wonder he swept her off her feet.
I really think I'm giving them a fair shot, but other than Chinatown and The Graduate, and maybe the Wizard of Oz, which was waaay ahead of its time, I have yet to see a movie from before 1976 that didn't absolutely stink on ice.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
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