Most of the Biblical epics of the forties, fifties and sixties were visually spectacular, but "David and Bathsheba" is something of an exception, even though it was inspired by the success of DeMille's very different "Samson and Delilah" from two years earlier. Here there are no magnificent sets, no spectacular battle scenes, no gladiatorial combats, no visual effects set pieces comparable to the collapse of the temple in "Samson" or the parting of the Red Sea in "The Ten Commandments". Nor is there anything like the orgy scene from "Solomon and Sheba" from around a decade later. The most elaborate scene is the combat between David and Goliath, told in flashback; this part of David's story is not really relevant to his relationship with Bathsheba, but the names David and Goliath are so closely linked in the popular imagination that it would have been difficult to omit it.
This is a film which replies far more upon psychology and human relationships than it does upon spectacle. It seems to have been an influence on Bruce Beresford's "King David", that rare example of an epic from the eighties, which likewise eschewed spectacle. As the film opens David, who has united the Hebrew tribes into a single kingdom and led them to victories over their enemies, is successful in earthly terms but is, beneath the façade of a powerful monarch, a deeply unhappy man. He is troubled by grief over the death of his beloved friend Jonathan in battle. His marriage to Michal, the daughter of his predecessor Saul, has been an unhappy one and the two are estranged. Worst of all, he has become disillusioned with the religion of his kingdom, which he sees as excessively harsh and legalistic. As in Beresford's film, the chief representative of religious legalism is the prophet Nathan. In "King David" he is shown as advocating the wholesale slaughter of Philistine civilians; here he supports the application of the Mosaic Law in its full rigour, including the death penalty for offences such as adultery. (In the Bible Nathan is portrayed as speaking with the voice of God, or at least the voice of David's conscience, but in both films he emerges as a bloodthirsty and unsympathetic religious fanatic).
David's life is transformed when he falls in love with Bathsheba, but their relationship is a perilous one. As King of Israel, David is not above the law, unlike the kings of neighbouring countries who were, if the film is to be believed, legally privileged to seduce the wives of their subjects with impunity. Uriah is a boneheaded soldier who cares only for fighting and nothing for his wife, and who shares Nathan's zeal for enforcing the Law, including the Law as it relates to adultery, to the letter. And, in a departure from the Biblical story, David's wife Michal and his son Absalom are keen to press charges of adultery against Bathsheba, meaning that there is a real risk that she will be stoned to death. (In the Bible Absalom did indeed turn against his father, but for reasons quite unconnected with Bathsheba).
Having seen her both in "Demetrius and the Gladiators" (a poor performance in an otherwise reasonably good film) and "The Conqueror" (a bad performance in an atrocious one), I had concluded that Susan Hayward was not an actress ideally suited to the epic genre. Here, however, I was pleasantly surprised. Bathsheba is normally represented as a beautiful young woman, perhaps in her early twenties and considerably younger than David, but that is not how she Hayward portrays her in this film. She and Gregory Peck were much the same age, both in their mid-thirties in 1951. (Hayward, indeed, was considerably older than Kieron Moore who plays her husband Uriah). Although she was certainly attractive, Hayward plays Bathsheba not as the hapless object of David's lust but as his soul-mate, a woman as much in love with him as he is with her. Peck is excellent as David, a man torn between his love for Bathsheba and his conscience. He is also torn between his instincts, which are to rule as a relatively enlightened monarch, and the demands of certain of his subjects who would prefer a ruler who shared their own unenlightened zealotry.
Some have complained that the film does not follow the Bible faithfully enough, but in my view its main weakness is that it occasionally tries to steer a middle course between sticking slavishly to the Old Testament account and reinterpreting it, with unconvincing results. Nathan's parable about the rich man who stole the poor man's ewe-lamb is only convincing if one assumes that Uriah loved Bathsheba at least as much as David did, something which is clearly not the case here. It might also have been better if scriptwriter Philip Dunne had omitted the death of David and Bathsheba's firstborn child, even though this detail is indeed in the Bible. In the context of the film, however, it seems too much like a vindication of Nathan's vision of Jehovah as a wrathful and vindictive deity, ready to wreak vengeance upon innocent children while inexplicably sparing their guilty parents.
Overall, however, this is a low-key but pretty decent epic, proof that the Old Testament could serve as the basis for intelligent films as well as spectacular ones. It is certainly better than Beresford's rather dull "King David". 7/10
