The Bible: In the Beginning

Much of Huston’s later work, from The Night of the Iguana to Wise Blood, was concerned with conflicts between faith and doubt, orthodoxy and iconoclasm, public life and private spirituality—and it was in his mammoth adaptation, commissioned by Dino De Laurentiis, of the first half of the book of Genesis that these questions found their fullest expression. Pauline Kael called The Bible “an attempt to use the medium to its fullest, to overwhelm the senses and feelings, for gigantic myth-making, for a poetry of size and scope,” and Huston one of those rare filmmakers “whose prodigious failures could make other people’s successes look puny.” With The Bible, he also became one of the only filmmakers with the hubris to cast himself as—literally—the voice of God.