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John Wayne's World: Israel as Vietnam in Cast a Giant Shadow (1966)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2019

RODNEY WALLIS
RODNEY WALLIS*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales. Email: r.wallis@unsw.edu.au.
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Abstract

Melville Shavelson's Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) stands alongside Otto Preminger's Exodus (1960) as one of the most notable Hollywood films to center on the founding of Israel. In this paper I argue that Cast a Giant Shadow is less concerned with the peculiarities of the nascent stages of the Arab–Israeli conflict, and instead functions as an unabashed endorsement of American military interventionism in foreign conflicts at a time in which the United States was dramatically escalating its military presence in Vietnam. The film is positioned as the second installment in an unofficial trilogy of overtly propagandistic pro-interventionist cinema produced by John Wayne's production company Batjac in the 1960s, alongside The Alamo (1960), Wayne's directing debut, and the notoriously jingoistic pro-Vietnam War film The Green Berets (1968). My analysis of this largely overlooked entry in the Wayne oeuvre ultimately reveals how Israel enabled Wayne to effectively put his art at the service of his political beliefs.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 725 - 743
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2019 

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References

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