List Price: $14.98Amazon.com's Price: $13.49 You Save: $1.49 (10%)as of 11/24/2009 09:18 EST
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping.
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: DVD
Brand: Warner Brothers
EAN: 0012569797291
Feature: A young Hebrew named Micah, unsatisfied with his father's rural life, demands his inheritance so he can try his luck in the city. Once in the city he falls under the spell of a beautiful pagan priestess who induces him to squander his money and betray his faith. Only after many trials and tribulations does Micah recover his senses and return home to his forgiving father.Running Time: 112 min. F
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Item Dimensions: 100
Label: Warner Home Video
Languages: EnglishOriginal LanguageEnglishSubtitledFrenchSubtitled
Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
MPN: 79729
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Warner Home Video
Region Code: 1
Release Date: June 26, 2007
Running Time: 112 minutes
Studio: Warner Home Video
Theatrical Release Date: 1955
Features:- A young Hebrew named Micah, unsatisfied with his father's rural life, demands his inheritance so he can try his luck in the city. Once in the city he falls under the spell of a beautiful pagan priestess who induces him to squander his money and betray his faith. Only after many trials and tribulations does Micah recover his senses and return home to his forgiving father.Running Time: 112 min. F
Related Items:
Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
A young Hebrew named Micah unsatisfied with his father's rural life demands his inheritance so he can try his luck in the city. Once in the city he falls under the spell of a beautiful pagan priestess who induces him to squander his money and betray his faith. Only after many trials and tribulations does Micah recover his senses and return home to his forgiving father.Running Time: 112 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: UNRATED UPC: 012569797291 Manufacturer No: 79729
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
A real extravaganza with beautiful sets and lots of extras. Beautiful Lana Turner at her best. This is Hollywood at it's best. A lot of the costars that you regognize from the time. Lana, in her costumnes is a sight to behold. All the stff that makes this type of movie great. Slaves building temples, human sacrafice, lavish temples, a handsome leading man (Edmund Purdom)who is enslaved after faling hopelessly in love with Lana, the high Priestess, then rises to take down the sacraligious kingdom. A fine film for anyone who enjoys Hollywood extravaganzas.
Rating:  -
This movie is neither historical nor Biblical. It barely relates to a story of a prodigal son in the New Testament and the rest is Hollywood at its best producing cheap thrills, fantasy sets, and innocuous dialogue.
If you are looking for some delicious trash, soft-porn, hilarious accidental comedy, this is it. This movie has no relation whatsoever with the ancient goddess Astarte, the iconography is wrong, the rites also, the depiction of Baal is also mistaken, the costumes completely off, vaguely Babylonian, which is somewhere about 1000 years off in time and 500 miles to the East of location.
It is all ABOUT Lana Turner as Samarra, a pagan 'priestess of the flesh' possibility. The first time she appears, it's in a cream colored dress designed to make her look more naked than dressed, for the fashion conscious it should be noted that this outfit is a direct ancestor of the Cher fashion statement of the 80's when she had her TV show. Within the context of a retrograde period in American culture, of racial repression and Hollywood black lists I for one consider the wearing of this revealing costume an act of heroism, not to mention deserving of the purple heart equivalent of fashion bravery.
In an America before Jackie, where people actually thought that fashion pertained to the weird hats on Mamie Eisenhower, Lana's appearance as the priestess of sex must have been like an atomic explosion of sensory overload: She sashays her way into a ritual for the purpose of seducing Micah (Edmund Perdum) who apparently found a niche as Mr. Nice guy with a weakness for the femme fatale (he played a very similar role in the famous fiasco, "The Egyptian") holding her hands together in a gesture as empty of ritualistic significance as if she were holding her eyeliner, she lights candles and walks the walk around the faithful mainly for the purpose of giving Micah a saucy side glance that could burn a hole into a stone and set an entire stallion stable on fire.
At the time it was released, despite its huge $5 million budget it was panned as a vulgar extravaganza. It is, every inch of it, but it has enormous entertainment value, which leads me to believe a Broadway musical version of this material could make a fortune now if Nicole Kidman decided to play the high priestess role that Lana plays to the hilt, I sincerely believe it is the best performance of her entire career, and she never looked more ravishing. She looks exquisite in yards of fabric in a series of gowns that almost include all the colors of the rainbow. Her hair is piled up in a do that makes her look like she has small horns, a most becoming devilish look that is anything but accidental. She wears more jewelry than a Harry Winston window display the week before Christmas and she has the role of her life: This priestess is as vapid as a high fashion super-model of today, she is so self centered and infatuated with her beauty that she can barely walk straight, but she fills that screen totally with her garish sex appeal, like melting chocolate with mocha syrup covering a sundae cup.
Micah's family looks so weird with the most synthetic beards in Hollywood history, that you can't really blame him for shaving and playing it up in Damascus with the pagans. However he is in trouble from the start as he played good Samaritan and recued the escaped slave of Nahreeb, high priest of Baal, here played by Louis Calhern in a permanently sadistic mood, pierced ears included. I hope his outfits were re-cycled as sofa cushions for vinyl sofas in LA, such precious polyesters are not produced anymore and they looked synthetically dyed enough to last till the Second Coming, intact in their blinding splendor.
In her big temple scene Lana is perfectly devoid of any expression as a gorgeous athlete-sacrifice victim, much looking like a Swede than a middle eastener, is pushed into the holy fire by her sacred kiss.
For that matter no one in the movie is remotely in tune with the ethnicity of the region, and that includes Lana herself and her own version of Mini-me, a little blonde girl Lana look-alike- brat, that she is educating to to be the future priestess of Astarte, a creature so annoying and overbearing, one wishes they would have applied the true sacrifice to Astarte which were first born children...But my favorite moment is when Lana is attending a performance of a fable by her brat disciple and other children in the magnificent temple halls and yet one has the strange sensation that she is watching a television program somewhere in Staten Island with her favorite niece. How she can manage to transform that expensive pseudo-architecture into a suburban home atmosphere with her gesturing and sexy whispering is perhaps one of the outstanding miracle performances of Hollywood history and she should have been getting two Oscars for that scene alone: One for special effects and another for Lifetime Illusion technique.
But this ... Read More
Rating: -
I haven't much to say about this movie, actually. What can be said of another swords-and-sandals Hollywood Biblical epic, starring the pagan goddess of Camp herself, Lana Turner? The $5,000,000 spent on it practically thrusts it's way out at you, along with the bosum of the plasticine Miss Turner. It is a passable fleshing-out (no pun, etc.)of Christ's parable, though that isn't, for me, it's primary appeal--I've read a bit of Biblical/historical/theological/philosophical exegesis(hope that doesn't sound too pretentious, but I majored in Lit. & Philosophy and I read alot), and besides, that's not what I want from a M-G-M Bible movie. It's alot of fun, so "do unto others" and recommend it to everyone you know who likes his/her Biblihistorical movies a little top-heavy.
Rating: -
Lana Turner was pure magic, emotion and sensation in her long walk through the temple of love... And "The Prodigal" will remain the best showcase ever equipped for her excellent figure... The film is M.G.M.'s entry in the CinemaScope Bible race...
Lana was cast as Samarra, the lightly-clad temptress who incited history's first juvenile delinquent to leave home...
The film was based on the Biblical story of the prodigal son as told by St. Luke in Chapter XV of his gospels... There, in fewer than 300 words is the bare suggestion of a youth who "wasted his substance in riotous living," later to return, repentant to farm and father...
The screenplay portrayed the prodigal as Micah (Edmond Purdom), the model son of a Hebrew patriarch named Eli (Walter Hampden). As the film begins he has honored his father by becoming engaged to Ruth (Audrey Dalton), a gentle girl of his own faith...
While visiting Damascus, however, the youth enters the tent of Samarra, the high priestess of Astarte, goddess of the flesh, and he is dazzled by her beauty... To his father's bitter dismay, he demands his share of the family fortune, leaves his fiancée on the eve of their marriage, and goes off to the city in pursuit of the pagan woman, whose duties include presiding over human sacrificial rites...
Among the fleshpots of Damascus, Micah's uncontrollable infatuation for the priestess plunges him into a variety of mishaps... He is victimized by Nahreeb (Louis Calhern), the sinister high priest of Baal, who conspires to destroy him for his irreverent interest in Samarra; by Bosra (Francis L. Sullivan), an unscrupulous moneylender; and even by Samarra herself, who withholds her love until he produces a certain valuable pearl as a gift for her goddess...
Rating: -
GREAT FILM WITH LANA TURNER. THE STORY IS DURING THE BIBLICAL TIME PERIOD, AND THE CONTRAST OF CHRISTIAN & HEATHENS. A CLASSIC FILM STYLE THAT WAS POPULAR WITH THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, STORY OF JESUS, THE STORY OF RUTH, AND OTHERS.
|
