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Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) and other cinematic behemoths. Long unseen but now on DVD, the picture’s gigantism shows the influence of D.

It cost so much to produce that to this day it remains Austria’s most expensive film (allowing for inflation). In 1922, a Hungarian director working in Vienna dared to make a film titled Sodom und Gomorrha. Throughout the opening decades of the 20th century, the very phrase “Sodom and Gomorrah” was code for unspeakable pleasures.Įurope was braver than the U.S. It’s less surprising, however, when you consider what a forbidden topic this tale really was, even in the early years of Modernism. It took almost three decades following the invention of motion pictures for Sodom and Gomorrah to reach the silver screen, a surprising fact if you recall the new medium’s zest for titillation. The Bible, like Hollywood, is populated by a lot of Jewish people.In pre-1960s Hollywood pictures, stories typically had happy endings when characters adhered to American middle-class values: monogamous heterosexuality, maintenance of strong family ties, patriotism, respect for mainstream religion, crimes suitably punished, a place for women and minorities which they instinctively knew and stayed in. In the Bible, stories end well when characters obey Yahweh.Among the colorful, indelible characters in movies and in the Bible are heroes, villains, harlots, tricksters, murderers and their victims, monsters, musicians, kings, queens, slaves, wise and foolish men and women, warriors, peacemakers, and so on.The Bible, like the movies, contains a number of genres: morality tales, adventure, family drama, fables, royal and dynastic chronicles, musicals (e.g., the Psalms), romances, disasters, sci-fi, biographies, epics, war stories, and so on.They are both replete with a large body of stories, many unforgettable and others lame or pointless.Both operate from a vast root system of mythology that extends in a thousand directions.That’s because the biblical version is already as farfetched as the script of a Hollywood epic, and also because Hollywood and the Bible have a great deal in common, to wit: IF YOUR ACQUAINTANCE with Sodom and Gomorrah were limited to what you see in movies, your impression might differ only slightly from the story in Genesis 19.