David and Bathsheba (1951)

David and Bathsheba is a really interesting biblical movie. (It's boring, don't get me wrong; I am not here to say that it is a good movie.) But although this movie looks like your typical swords-and-sandals epic – it has the lush score by Alfred Newman, the beautiful Leon Shamroy cinematography, the insanely enormous cast, beautiful art direction, big stars – but what is interesting about this movie is that this movie is skeptical of a Christianity/Judaism that is invested in laws and punishment and destruction. It is also skeptical of priests who interpret the desires of gods. Henry King's film doesn't go quite so far as to say that the priests in David and Bathsheba are corrupt and self-seeking – although it certainly could have taken this tack if it wished – but this is a skeptical film, one that asks its audiences to think ethically about punishment, cruelty, desert, and judgment.

Susan Hayward as Bathsheba

David and Bathsheba conflates a series of events in Hebrew history – the affair of David and Bathsheba and the civil war of Absalom against his father – but more than anything this is a kind of character study of David himself. The film spends long minutes exploring David's face while nothing else happens. We watch David carefully as he makes decisions, as he wars with himself, as he debates the nonsense spoken by the priest of Israel.

As I say, this is a really weird film. It is in the film's third act when we flashback to Samuel's anointing of David as a shepherd boy and then to David's battle with Goliath. Of course, this means that we follow David as a young man (i.e. not Gregory Peck) at the end of the film rather than the film's star, Gregory Peck, whom we have been following for the movie's first ninety minutes.

Despite this poster's promises, Gregory Peck wears a shirt at all times.

The film justifies David and Bathsheba's affair from the beginning. They like each other, an Bathsheba's husband does not love her. He does not even care about her, and is not the least interested in what she thinks. In the end, even the film's god blesses David and Bathsheba's relationship. It is, as I say, a film made by a skeptic. The conflict in the film is that David has forgotten the ways of the god and has broken the Mosaic law. The film doesn't really believe this, but tries to make us believe this in act two by introducing a prophet none of us likes. Then in act three, David argues with Bathsheba about those laws. One of the great moments in the movie is in the third act, when David tells Bathsheba that the god he knew as a boy, in the trees and rocks is not the god of vengeance that the priests preach. (In act two the film watches a beautiful woman get stoned to death for adultery. It's a sequence that judges this kind of law very harshly, but it doesn't seem to treat those laws in an orientalist fashion. In other words, David and Bathsheba doesn't call Mosaic law backward or barbaric as such. Instead, it is asking audiences to judge these laws for themselves, and to be skeptical of unjust law in general.)

But what David does at the end of the film is in fact defy the Mosaic law and go talk to the god directly. Once he does this – once he remembers the god – the god forgives him and it rains in Israel. What the film is saying is that laws against adultery aren't important (it has said that throughout the film). Each man must make the ethical choices that accord with his own beliefs. As long as the individual remembers the god, believes in him, pays homage to him, then his behavior is immaterial – or at least mostly immaterial. Even David's murder of Uriah the Hittite, Bathsheba's husband, is apparently forgiven by the rain that the god sends at the film's end.