Uploaded 30 June 2000
When Robert Aldrich undertook to make a biblical epic in 1961, he had enough artistic successes under his belt (Kiss Me Deadly, USA 1955, Vera Cruz, USA 1954, The Last Sunset, USA 1961) to earn him a reputation as one of Hollywood’s leading auteurs. So much so that when Sodom and Gomorrah (Italy/France 1962) was released, Movie, which had joined with Cahiers du cinema in championing him, felt obliged to apologize to their readers in their review of the film, adding that, happily, Aldrich had gone on to make What Ever happened to Baby Jane? (USA 1962) while the editing of Sodom and Gomorrah was being debated in the Italian courts.
Although sand and sandal epics were the blockbusters of their era (making Cecil B. DeMille the equivalent of Steven Spielberg in terms of prestige and revenues), they have aged badly, and Sodom and Gomorrah has all the drawbacks of the breed: wall-to-wall “history-speak”, without slang or contractions; big scenes reduced to the level of a high-school halftime performance by battalions of lumbering non-pro extras that stretch as far as the eye can see; idiotic costumes (the nomad warriors sport shields covered with fur); pretty Italian actors playing Jews and Sodomites alike; special effects out of a Mothra movie; and a score by Miklos Rosza that is entirely composed of cliches, including woo-woo Indian attack music over shots of the nomad cavalry.
The authors of Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich? [1] (1) manfully attempt to rescue the film for the auteur theory by proposing Lot, the hero, as a typical Aldrichian deluded-leader figure, which he is, and Aldrich told Peter Bogdanovich that he might have brought it off if he had had “a guy you could believe was Lot” [2] (2).
Instead he had Stewart Granger, and, with Lot in almost every scene, neither Anouk Aimee (fresh from filming Lola, France 1960), nor Stanley Baker (warming up for Joseph Losey’s Eva, UK 1962) could keep Granger’s earnest performance from sinking the ship; but they give it all they’ve got as a perverse brother-sister team (Aimee runs Sodom; Baker runs Gomorrah, which doesn’t seem to have been in the budget) whose legacy from their mother includes a penchant for S&M games learned in childhood: after a political argument which establishes that Sis is still in charge, Baker lovingly bites her fingers, eliciting a wince of pleasure, but when she returns the favor, he remains impassive. “You feel nothing?”, she says, as it dawns on her that he no longer loves her. “Neither pleasure…nor pain”, he retorts with a meta-sadistic smile.
“Unless I believe in a picture, I can’t make it,” Aldrich told an interviewer. “I’m the guy, remember, who spent two years making Sodom and Gomorrah. You’ve got to be an idiot to pretend to yourself that a film like that is worthwhile. But I did.” [3] (3) His partner in delusion was Hugo Butler, a blacklistee who had done an uncredited rewrite of Aldrich’s first personal film, World for Ransom (USA 1954), and would reteam with him seven years later for The Legend of Lylah Clare (USA 1968). Although there is no reason to revise contemporary evaluations of the picture today, Butler’s script for Sodom and Gomorrah (preserved in the Arts Special Collection of the UCLA Library) was interesting enough that a closer study of what resulted from Aldrich’s two years in the desert can be instructive.
A Marxist parable
The film opens well, with the camera dollying over a mass of intertwined, exhausted orgiasts, until it comes to rest on a shot of one participant who is wide awake: Tara, the favorite slave of Sodom’s queen (Aimee). A reverse-shot shows us that Tara is actually in league with the Queen’s ambitious brother Astoroth (Baker). When he gives her the nod to get going, she mounts up and rides into the desert carrying a message to the Helamites, a band of nomad warriors with whom Astoroth has made a pact to seize power from his sister. As we follow Tara’s progress, we get our first view of the city, its salt mines, and the slaves who work them.
Rumor has it that this credit sequence was directed by Sergio Leone before he left the film, but the criss-crossing signatures we will be examining are those of the writer and director. The opening “after the orgy” shot, for example, though it was devised by Aldrich as a prologue to the action written for the film’s opening by Butler (Tara riding out to the Helamites) perfectly symbolize Butler’s intentions: the tracking shot over the tapestry of bodies instantly delivers on the sexual promise of the film’s title, but ends on wide-awake Tara, whose lucidity is political.
Greatly expanding on the Bible’s sketchy account of Lot’s sojourn in the twin cities of evil, Butler’s script is a Marxist parable about a wrong turn taken by part of the Hebrews on the way to the Promised Land: because of a quarrel among their herdsmen, Abraham went to Canaan and his brother Lot to Sodom. After the prologue setting up Sodom, Butler begins with the arrival of Lot and his followers and proceeds to leave its biblical source far behind.
Butler’s mouthpiece is Alabias, a Sodomite abolitionist who is beaten by soldiers for denouncing the salt trade as the foundation of Sodom’s wealth and the need for a work-force of slaves to keep it going:
You who monopolize that one commodity more valuable in Africa than gold – salt! – who use the precious stuff to keep your cruel fingers tight on the heartstrings of a whole continent – who trade your salt for leather, jewels, perfumes, pig fat or gold, or that most precious of commodities – the only holy thing that exists – human flesh and blood. Your life based on this crime, how can you tell truth from lie, or right from wrong?
Alabias’ speech, spoken in the film’s opening minutes, subordinates the deunciation of Sodom’s morals to a denunciation of the economic system which sustains the Sodomite empire and perverts its inhabitants’ ideas of right and wrong. The sadomasochistic sexual practices shown in the film (scenes of torture) and the Sadean ideology which justifies them (expressed in such aphorisms as “Violence is useless unless it yields pleasure”) are rooted in slavery, a practice necessitated by the salt trade. A bad economic system nurtures twisted appetites.
It is here that Aldrich and Butler begin to part company, for Alabias’ speech gets rewritten in the film. Not surprisingly, the blasphemous notion that “human flesh and blood” is “the only holy thing that exists” is dropped. The most important change, however, is political: the causality Butler was at pains to trace is reversed. In the film Alabias says that the Sodomites pursue the salt trade in order to buy slaves for their sadistic pleasures, which we are left to assume are an innate vice of the human animal. Twisted appetites and economic abuses are now both results of Original Sin.
The film preserves all the plot-twists of Butler’s political allegory, while more or less stripping them of their original meaning. Although Lot forbids any Hebrew to cross the river separating them from Sodom when they first settle on its banks, he believes he is doing God’s will when he decides, after stopping the Helamite invasion and discovering a huge salt deposit on the land they bought from the Queen, to move his people into the city and take up the salt trade: “We will show them that a society of free men can make more profit than a society based on slavery. God chose to turn my people from shepherds into merchants.” (The next-to-last line, which makes Lot a prototype for the bourgeoisie as social revolutionaries, was eliminated in the film.)
By trying to found a democratic and capitalistic alternative to Sodom, Lot turns his back on the primitive communism he invoked when he stopped one of his followers from buying surplus salt for purposes of trade: “Salt belongs to everyone – like air, like water.” He also takes his first step on a slippery slope that will lead him and his followers from wanting to end slavery to tolerating as part of their covenant with the Queen, which he believes is the “moral ground” for their presence inside the city walls, even though his honest lieutenant Ishmael warms him: “We have no moral ground in Sodom as long as one man remains a slave.”
Sounding a lot like a nineteenth-century abolitionist with an economic bent, Lot replies (in the sript) that accumulating wealth in the salt trade will enable them to “free future slaves, cutting off Sodom’s labor supply while we outproduce them.” When this policy is put into effect, however, economics will teach Lot a Brechtian lesson. One of the film’s most powerful images is the cart that carries off dead slaves, the detritus of Sodom’s economic system, to be dumped in the desert – a mirror-image of the bodies at the orgy, which is underlined by a slavemaster’s ironic reference to it (in the script) as “the marriage cart”. When things go from bad to worse because the Sodomites are forced to drive their slaves harder to keep up with their canny new competitors, a slave complains: “Before the Hebrews came here there was only one cart a day…” Aldrich jettisons the irony, but keeps the idea that the Hebrews have become complicit in the slave economy, as dramatized in an episode Butler wrote for the last act: when Ishmael leads a slave revolt and Astoroth’s men put it down, the Hebrews, good citizens of Sodom, refuse the fleeing slaves sanctuary in their homes.
Unfortunately for the coherence of his film, Aldrich suddenly switches to black slaves at this point (a montage of closeups of black hands and arms being thrust back by yarmulke-wearing Jewish householders as they slam their doors), attempting to assimilate this part of Butler’s tale to the American civil rights movement, which used acts of civil disobedience of the kind Lot’s legalistic sense of propriety (and property) keeps him from endorsing. While laudable, the attempt at a contemporary political allegory comes off as merely bizarre because the givens of the story oblige the director to show Jews as cowards who refuse to help, when in fact the American Jewish community was disproportionately numerous in the sit-ins and on the freedom buses that were mounting an assault on Jim Crow laws in the South.
Cinema and sadism
Aldrich’s attempt to replace Butler’s Marxist critique of Lot’s errors with a moral critique of his own, which makes Lot a surrogate for the filmmaker, is more successful. When Astoroth goads Lot into a duel by revealing in front of the Sodomite court that he has seduced both of Lot’s daughters, Lot kills him despite pleas for mercy from one of the daughters and warnings from his wife (former Sodomite sex-slave Ildrith, played by Pier Angeli) that he is falling into a trap by yielding to the urge for vengeance. In the script, the Queen imprisons Lot for killing a member of the royal family, setting the scene for a jail-break engineered by two of God’s angels before the destruction of the city, but Aldrich gives the scene a different twist.
“Congratulations,” says the Queen, as it begins to dawn on the Hebrew leader what he has done. “How delicious it is to cause death, to see life leaking out of a body and to think, ‘I did this.’ You are a true Sodomite – welcome. Just look at your Hebrews’ – cutaways to shamefaced Hebrews who have witnessed the duel ‘ “Next only to the pleasure of giving death is the excitement of watching it. They were participants in every bloody moment.”
This indictment of the sadistic pleasures of watching a spectacle like Sodom and Gomorrah, and of organizing one, comments retrospectively on the film’s battle scenes (Helamites being shot with burning arrows and inundated with burning oil), which are on the same wavelength as the scenes of torture: a slave girl put in a cage with a blind warrior whose armor extrudes deadly spikes when his breathing becomes elevated; rebellious slaves being burned alive on a wheel; or a Hebrew traitor being roasted in burning oil after helping Astoroth by sabotaging Lot’s strategy for defeating the Helamites, while noble Ishmael watches with a huge smile. The Queen is even allowed to include in her indictment of Lot the drowning of the Helamites after he ordered the Hebrews’ dam to be broken down – a desperate move brought about by the successful sabotage attempt. Without a word of protest, Lot permits the Queen to characterize his action as unmotivated cruelty, then condemns himself to prison. The illogic of her indictment of his self-flagellating acts, both of which were added after Butler’s screenplay, point up the real meaning of the Queen’s description of the flood as an act of gratuitous sadism: if Lot is innocent on that point, Aldrich isn’t.
In a sense, then, Sodom and Gomorrah is a victory for the politique des auteurs. Even though the director’s very personal reading of the screenplay is erected over the bleached bones of Butler’s Marxist parable – which still poke through in places – its denunciation of the DeMille syndrome, implicit in the genre, imparts to the film a different kind of complexity: “In the name of righteousness and your God,” concludes the Queen, “you have abandoned yourself to the lust for blood.”
We are not far from Aldrich’s portrayal of Mickey Spillane’s revenge-driven hero Mike Hammer as a sadist in Kiss Me Deadly, where the story of Lot’s wife turning to salt after looking back at the destruction of Sodom is one of the cautionary myths Albert Dekker pretentiously trots out in response to an uncomprehending Gaby Rodgers’ stubborn insistence on knowing “what’s in the box.” Her character’s need to see, and its consequences, are replayed in their original archetypal context at the end of Sodom and Gomorrah.
To motivate that famous final moment, Butler had written an earlier scene where Ildrith, who was originally the Queen’s concubine, is seduced by her former mistress after moving back into the palace as Mrs. Lot, for which purpose the Queen employs surprisingly convincing arguments based on the Hewbrews’ pre-feminist notions about the role of women in society.
Although that seduction may have been part of the fifteen minutes Aldrich finally agreed to cut from the movie after a prolongued dispute with his producer, it seems likelier that he never filmed it all all, because he has given Ildrith a tragic motivation for disobeying the divine injunction not to look back at Sodom: she still doesn’t share her husband’s faith, preferring to believe that Lot’s achievements are his own, and looks back to prove to herself and to him that there is no God.
No matter: Aldrich’s editing makes the climactic explosion that engulfs the city in a ball of flame the effect of Ildrith’s rapt, ecstatic gaze, shown in a tight closeup – a look of joy which turns to fear as her eyes follow the smoke rising from the flames to form a mushroom cloud whose top we can’t see.
Footnotes:
[1](1) Alain Silver and James Ursini, What Ever Happened to Robert Aldrich? (New York: Limelight Editions, 1995).
[2] (2) Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made it? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997) 790.
[3] (3) Silver and Ursini, 22.