John Huston’s The Bible…in the Beginning is as
misbegotten as any big-budget movie of its era, its superficial fidelity to the
source and humorless solemnity embodying a perceived importance, if not
transformative capacity, but barely coherent as conventional narrative while also
lacking any sense of unifying mystery or basic theological curiosity. The film travels
through God’s initial establishment of the light and creation of the world,
through the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel, making
dull use of the likes of Richard Harris and Peter O’Toole, sometimes momentarily
impressing with its spectacle and resources, but never penetrating or moving: the
episodically plodding, literal approach succeeds at least in establishing God’s
unknowable, if not wantonly capricious, nature, but offers almost no discernible
means of navigation. As presented here, for instance, the mythic grandeur of
the Noah story can hardly surmount endless questions: how one old man and his
family possess the resources and know-how to harvest so much timber, build such
a seaworthy vessel and so on; what kind of land it is in which kangaroos,
hippos and polar bears live in close proximity; what the point of the flood was
when the movie depicts mankind rapidly returning to its fractured and sparring
ways (even so, the Noah episode at least possess a sense of fun absent from the
rest of the movie, with Huston himself turning in the film’s most enjoyable performance).
The film concludes with its longest segment, the story of Abraham (George C.
Scott), presented here as a one-note trudge, much of it likely to be mystifying
to non-scholars (one’s resistance reaching a pinnacle in the brutal final
testing of Abraham’s faith). The film’s approach ultimately might seem forged
in veiled contempt as much as in intelligent engagement or respectful devotion.
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