Trailer
Plot summary
Kitty Fremont, a widowed American nurse who has been working in Greece, visits Cyprus and learns of the Karaolos internment camp, where thousands of Jewish refugees, many of them Holocaust survivors, are held by the British and refused passage to Palestine. General Sutherland, an acquaintance of her late husband, suggests she volunteer there. She hesitates, uncomfortable around Jews, then agrees. In the camp she befriends Karen Hansen Clement, a Danish teenager searching for her missing father. Meanwhile Ari Ben Canaan, a Haganah member and former British Army captain, takes 611 Jews aboard a cargo ship bound for Palestine. When British forces blockade Famagusta harbor, Kitty uses her connection to Sutherland to board and confirm the refugees have chosen to go. They begin a hunger strike, and Ari says he will destroy the ship unless it is allowed to sail.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Exodus (1960)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Preminger openly hired screenwriter Trumbo, who had been on the Hollywood blacklist for over a decade and had won the 1957 Academy Award for Best Screenplay under the pseudonym "Robert Rich"; together with Spartacus, Exodus is credited with ending blacklisting in the US motion picture industry.
- After Preminger rejected Newman's suggested changes to the script and dressed him down for making them, Newman hid a mannequin on a high balcony and threw it over at the end of a fight scene; not realizing it was a practical joke, Preminger collapsed and required medical attention.
- The British authorities refused to help Otto Preminger with the logistical side of filming; their only assistance was an armed guard placed on the large number of decommissioned rifles used as props, to prevent them falling into the hands of EOKA and being recommissioned.
- Preminger hired blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo and collaborated with him on a script in forty days; Trumbo had never visited Israel, which produced errors such as locating the Acre prison break, in reality a coastal city, in the middle of the desert.
- The film's theme became a hit record in its own right: a version of the theme by Ferrante & Teicher reached number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1961.
- The Karen Hansen part was originally offered to Hayley Mills, but her parents turned it down; the film was also one of John Derek's last appearances as an actor.
- The theme traveled a long way from the film itself: the WWF used the main theme as the wrestler Mr. Perfect's song.
