Trivia / Exodus (1960)

• Ability over Appearance: Although many critics felt that Paul Newman was miscast as Ari Ben Canaan (other than his famous blue eyes), he really doesn't bear any resemblance to the Ari of the novel, who had black hair and was quite tall. Otto Preminger maintained that he had envisioned only Newman playing the part from the time he read the novel. Sal Mineo looks nothing like the Dov Landau of the novel, but turns in an Oscar-nominated performance.
• Dawson Casting: Sal Mineo was 20, playing 17-year-old Dov Landau. Averted with Jill Haworth, who turned 15 during filming her part as 15-year-old Karen.
• Disowned Adaptation: Leon Uris, author of the original novel, disliked this film. Partly this was because Otto Preminger made no secret of his belief that it was a poorly written book (calling it shit to screenwriter Dalton Trumbo) with extremely interesting subject matter. And, frankly, the book's Doorstopper nature, along with the fact that Leon Uris is well-known for piling Backstory onto Backstory, make it not exactly easy to adapt to film. Many people have opined that it would make a rather effective miniseries (much like QB VII, the successful 1974 miniseries adaptation of a Uris novel), but as a feature film it clocks in at just under three and a half hours - and ends at the midpoint of the novel!
• Enforced Method Acting: Otto Preminger got the children on-set to cry for one scene by telling them that their mothers had all given them up and no longer wanted them.
• Fake Nationality: Almost everyone. Eva Marie Saint and Ralph Richardson are the only two major characters to actually be the same nationality they're portraying. Paul Newman, Lee J. Cobb, and David Opatoshu were actually Jewish, however.
• Hostility on the Set: Otto Preminger easily lived up to his Prima Donna Director reputation on-set, and clashed frequently with Paul Newman (see also Enforced Method Acting above).
• Referenced by...:
  • Singles: After Steve is let go from his job, during his time of "regrouping", he says he read half of Exodus.
  • Mad Men: In the first season episode "Babylon", Sterling Cooper takes the Israeli Tourism Board as a client, and one of the people at the meeting gives Don a copy of the novel to read. Being the serious reader that he is, he reads it, although he disagrees with the others at the office (he finds it too sentimental), and he asks Rachel Menken, a different client, for advice. She's not too thrilled he came to her (for several reasons), though she's intrigued when she hears Paul Newman is going to be in the movie version).
  • Bob Dylan's early satirical song "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" has its conspiracy-obsessed anti-Communist narrator conclude that Neo-Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell was the only "true American", explaining that "I know for a fact he hates Commies 'cause he picketed the movie Exodus" (referring to a 1961 incident where Rockwell protested a premiere of the film in Boston, only to flee after being met by 2,000 counter-demonstrators).
• Romance on the Set: Jill Haworth and Sal Mineo dated for awhile and remained friends afterward.
• What Could Have Been: John Saxon was considered for Dov Landau.

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