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The Big Fisherman

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Buena Vista. Director Frank Borzage; Producer Rowland V. Lee; Screenplay Howard Estabrook, Rowland V. Lee; Camera Lee Garmes; Editor Paul Weatherwax; Music Albert Hay Malotte; Art Director John De Cuir

Howard Keel
Susan Kohner
John Saxon
Martha Hyer
Herbert Lom
Ray Stricklyn

The Big Fisherman is a pious but plodding account of the conversion to Christianity of Simon-Peter, the apostle called 'the fisher of men'. Its treatment is reverent but far from rousing.

There is plenty of opportunity for both spectacle and sex, and it is all the more curious, considering its big budget and leisurely production schedule, that both are almost absent. Although the climax of the film is in Herod's palace where Salome served the head of John the Baptist to the tyrant, this scene, laid in a sumptuous and impressively lavish banquet hall, is done almost entirely by shadows and is swiftly over. Salome, in fact, is not only never shown, she is never mentioned.

Although the title seems to make Simon-Peter the central character, the film [from the novel by Lloyd C. Douglas] is only incidentally about him. His part in the story is his influence on two young lovers, John Saxon as an Arab prince and Susan Kohner as the daughter of Herod by an Arab princess. Saxon wants to succeed his father as chieftan of an Arab tribe and Kohner wants to kill her father for the unhappiness he has inflicted on her mother.

Kohnner and Saxon make a handsome young couple. But their problems seem trivial against the turbulent era. Howard Keel is handsomely picturesque as Simon-Peter, and shows he can hold his own as a straight actor. It is not his fault that there is no suggestion of the doughty strength identified with the chief apostle.

The 'Palestine' that is the film's setting was shot entirely on locations in the San Fernando Valley and the California desert. It seems entirely authentic.

(Color) Widescreen. Extract of a review from 1959. Running time: 180 MIN.

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