Word: gideon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Mean Spear. When Paddy Chayefsky's Gideon was on the road in Philadelphia, Fredric March, who plays God, graciously requested that Douglas Campbell (Gideon) be given equal billing. The gesture was just. Campbell's is a star performance throughout, a convincing portrait of an Old Testament bumpkin who holds earthy colloquy with his Maker ("I can't love you, God, you're too vast a concept") and shivers under the impact of the divine power that enables him to command his tribe and save his people. Campbell, 39, also built the foundations of his career...
...Broadway Gideon, by Paddy Chayefsky. A lustrous morality play about the simple farmer chosen by the Lord to lead the Israelites to victory over the Midianites. Fredric March as the Lord and Douglas Campbell as Gideon are, to put it mildly, magnificent. Chayefsky's vocabulary spirals off into rhetoric and his reasoning is sometimes flawed, but his theme is enduring-man's relationship...
...genius at work. March hisses and rumbles like an active volcano, and his "I am the Lord" is an eruption of molten lava. At times, March seems to take an actorish delight in playing the Lord, but he is awesome when, with magnetic all-seeing eyes, he probes for Gideon's soul in a speck of human dust. Douglas Campbell can be a simple-minded oaf one minute and a Judaic Henry V the next, and his voice ranges even more remarkably from a love-lyrical caress to a doggish snarl. At one affecting moment, he says simply...
...second and weaker of Gideon's two acts, Gideon falls un-Biblically out of love with the Lord. He fails to heed the Lord's command to kill some idolatrous Hebrew tribal chiefs. There is an extenuating fleshly circumstance. One of the chief's daughters is a pelvic marvel (Lorraine Egypt) who does a temptress dance to rival Salome's. More pertinently, and impertinently, Gideon pleads that his pity for fellow humans is above God's law. He asks the Lord to be released from the "covenant of love." arguing "You are too vast...
...glorify God and seem to agree that man must express, sanction, and glorify himself. Paradoxically, the denial and doubt of God have led not to the affirmation of man but to his greater despair. For it is despair from which such questing morality plays as J.B. and Gideon seem to spring...