John Wayne's World: Israel as Vietnam in Cast a Giant Shadow (1966)

Melville Shavelson's Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) stands alongside Otto Preminger's Exodus (1960) as one of the most notable Hollywood films to center on the founding of Israel. In this paper I argue that Cast a Giant Shadow is less concerned with the peculiarities of the nascent stages of t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of American studies 2019-08, Vol.53 (3), p.725-743
Main Author: WALLIS, RODNEY
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Allegory
American culture
Arab Israeli relations
Biographies
Case studies
Characters (Roles)
Conservatism
Directing
Epic literature
Exegesis & hermeneutics
Fate
Film adaptations
Founding
Heroism & heroes
Ideology
Interventionism
Jewish people
Literary characters
Literary devices
Military intervention
Motion picture production
Motion pictures
Narrative techniques
Plot (Narrative)
Political attitudes
Politics
Preminger, Otto
Propaganda
Shavelson, Melville
Time
Vietnam War
Wayne, John (1907-79)
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Summary:Melville Shavelson's Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) stands alongside Otto Preminger's Exodus (1960) as one of the most notable Hollywood films to center on the founding of Israel. In this paper I argue that Cast a Giant Shadow is less concerned with the peculiarities of the nascent stages of the Arab–Israeli conflict, and instead functions as an unabashed endorsement of American military interventionism in foreign conflicts at a time in which the United States was dramatically escalating its military presence in Vietnam. The film is positioned as the second installment in an unofficial trilogy of overtly propagandistic pro-interventionist cinema produced by John Wayne's production company Batjac in the 1960s, alongside The Alamo (1960), Wayne's directing debut, and the notoriously jingoistic pro-Vietnam War film The Green Berets (1968). My analysis of this largely overlooked entry in the Wayne oeuvre ultimately reveals how Israel enabled Wayne to effectively put his art at the service of his political beliefs.
ISSN:0021-8758
1469-5154
DOI:10.1017/S0021875819000124