Like Gone With the Wind, Exodus shows a scrupulous regard for the small facts of history, but sacrifices genuine historical complexity for the sake of the epic-sized image. Uris himself will do the final screenplay.Įxodus’s major characters-Ari and Jordana Ben Canaan, the cold, single-minded sabras Karen Clement, a deracinated but spiritually uplifted German refugee Dov Landau, her lover, an embittered survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and a concentration camp and the young American heroine, Kitty Fremont-stand in roughly the same relation to the reality of Israel as Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, and Ashley Wilkes do to the American Civil War and Reconstruction South. The distinctive quality of the book is cinematic it contains an almost exhaustive repertoire of film devices (fade-out, close-up, montage) rendered in prose terms. When this book was conceived four or five years ago, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contracted for the movie rights and financed the author’s trip to Europe and Israel “to research the story.” Thus, Exodus is not really a novel at all, but a sketch for a scenario with a few prose accretions-some simplified and sentimentalized Jewish history, large doses of Zionist publicity pamphlets ground down to fine pap, etc., etc. Uris previously converted his best-selling Battle Cry into a film, and wrote the screenplay for Gunfight at the O.K. Like many bestsellers, Exodus (a quarter-of-a-million copies sold to date 30-odd weeks on the best-seller list current sale 8,000 copies a week) was written with one eye on the movies.
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