December 25, 1959: The Film "Solomon and Sheba" Premieres

Yes, that's Yul Brynner, with hair,

and with Gina Lollobrigida.

December 25, 1959: The film Solomon and Sheba premieres. Because most businesses are closed on Christmas Day, and Jews don't celebrate the day, with a big meal or otherwise, movie theaters stay open, in the hopes that Jews will come and spend money there. For this reason, December 25 is often a premiere day for blockbuster films. The fact that Solomon and Sheba was an Old Testament tale helped, and the film was a hit.

In the Bible, where his story is told in 2nd Samuel, 1st Kings and 2nd Chronicles, Solomon was the son of King David and Queen Bathsheba, reigning for 40 years in the middle of the 10th Century BC, building the Temple that became the center of Jewish life, and being the wisest man in the known world. This last belief may have been contradicted by his marrying 700 women, having 300 concubines, and fathering countless children.

He is said to have met "the Queen of Sheba," who is not otherwise named in the text. 1st Kings 10:2 says she came to Jerusalem "with a very great retinue, with camels bearing spices, and very much gold, and precious stones." 2nd Chronicles 9 says, "Never again came such an abundance of spices."

1st Kings 10:13 says that when Solomon gave her "all her desire, whatsoever she asked," she left satisfied. That's a bit vague, and it could imply a sexual relationship between them. But that's the end of her mention in the Bible. Aside from a few inscriptions found in modern times, suggesting that there was trade between Israel and Sheba at the time, the land that is now "The Holy Land" (Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories) has given no known evidence. The Bible's Song of Songs, also known as The Song of Solomon, is an epic poem that is often suggested to be about the love between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, but this remains speculation.

There are other stories, which contradict the West's habit of calling the Queen by the name "Sheba." The Arab world, including the Quran, suggests that her name was Bilquis, that the land of Sheba was "Saba," including what is now southern Saudi Araba, Oman and Yemen. Modern Ethiopia suggests that her name was Makeda, and that Sheba was Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia, across the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden from Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Historians are not convinced that the woman existed, but concede that it is possible that her kingdom did, on either side, or even that she (or someone) ruled over both.

And both Arabic tradition and Ethiopian tradition says that, when the Queen left Jerusalem, she was pregnant with Solomon's child. He became her successor, the Emperor Menelik, who eventually copied his mother's journey, and met Solomon at the Temple, where he was received with joy. They also say that, upon his return, he took the Ark of the Covenant back with him, something not backup by any Jewish text.

In the film, Sheba is an enemy of Israel, as is Egypt, and the Queen (played by Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida) conspires with their Pharoah (British actor David Farrar) to undermine Solomon (the Russian-born American actor Yul Brynner, who had famously played a different Pharoah in The Ten Commandments). She seduces him, but as she spends more time with him, she finds herself falling in love with him as well.

The Queen introduces Sheban worship to the Temple Solomon has built, and an angry God damages the Temple and destroys the Sheban altar. Solomon's brother, Adonijah (British actor George Sanders), who was older and thought he should have been named successor by David, conspires with the Pharoah to raise an army to defeat Solomon. It succeeds, and Adonijah takes the throne.

The Hays Code still being in effect, the Queen repents of the harm she has done, and prays for God to restore Solomon. He wins a battle, and returns to Jerusalem. Adonijah finds that the people are not behind him, so he decides to win them over by sacrificing the Queen. Solomon arrives to find her already wounded and near death, but kills Adonijah. He prays for the Queen to be healed, and she is. But the price for regaining his throne and her health is that they be separated. The film ends as the Queen leaves for Sheba, knowing that she is pregnant with Solomon's child.

Sanders died in 1972, Vidor in 1982, Brynner in 1985, Farrar in 1995. As of December 25, 2022, Lollobrigida is still alive. (UPDATE: She died in 2023.)

Solomon, or Suleiman as he is known to Muslims, is revered by all 3 Abrahamic faiths, and by Ethiopian Jews and Christians. The Queen of Sheba is claimed by both Arabs and black Africans as one of their own. Both the Asiatic Russian Brynner and the Roman Lollobrigida looked "exotic" enough to have filled their roles to the satisfaction of Eisenhower-era Americans.

In the 1995 Showtime film Solomon & Sheba, the couple were played, respectively, by Hispanic actor Jimmy Smits and African-American actress Halle Berry; in the 1997 TNT film Solomon, by English actor Ben Cross and African-American actress Vivica A. Fox; and in the 2022 film Three Thousand Years of Longing by Lebanese actor Nicolas Mouawad and Ugandan model-actress Aamito Lagum. The story has been modernized in the 2001 film Brooklyn Babylon and the 2014 country-music-themed film The Song.

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December 25, 1959 was a Friday. Baseball was out of season. There were no college bowl games. The NFL was between the end of its regular season and its Championship Game, which the Baltimore Colts would win over the New York Giants in a rematch of the previous year's event.

There were 4 games in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks lost to the Boston Celtics, 123-119 at the old Madison Square Garden.

* The Philadelphia Warriors beat the Syracuse Nationals, 129-121 at the Hershey Sports Arena (now the Hersheypark Arena), outside Harrisburg in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Rookie Wilt Chamberlain scored 45 points and grabbed 34 rebounds. On March 2, 1962, he would have an even bigger game at that arena, scoring 100 points.

After that season, the Warriors moved to San Francisco. After another season, the Nationals moved to replace them, becoming the Philadelphia 76ers.

* The Cincinnati Royals beat the Detroit Pistons, 121-103 at the Cincinnati Gardens.

* And the St. Louis Hawks beat the Minneapolis Lakers, 112-96 at the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis. The Lakers moved to Los Angeles in 1960, and the Hawks moved to Atlanta in 1968.

There were 2 games in the NHL. The New York Rangers beat the Detroit Red Wings, 5-2 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit. And the Boston Bruins beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 5-1 at the Boston Garden.

While the NBA has made Christmas Day a traditional showcase for their league, the NHL last scheduled games for December 25 in 1971 -- not for religious reasons, but because the NFL began playing games on the day, and the NHL didn't want to compete for attention.

November 8, 1956: "The Ten Commandments" Premieres

November 8, 1956: The Ten Commandments premieres, produced, directed and narrated by Cecil B. DeMille, in big, splashy color, and with over-the-top dialogue.

DeMille had previously made a film with that title in 1923, in black-and-white, and silent. This was his last film (he died in 1959, age 77), and he got lucky on the timing: He got to film at the actual locations (in Egypt, including Mount Sinai) before the Suez Canal crisis began later in the year, at which point filming on location would have been harder than parting the Red Sea.

It was, up to that point, the most expensive movie ever made, costing $13 million -- about $141 million in today's money, which doesn't sound like the big deal it would have been even at the turn of the 21st Century. It made more money than any movie released that year, including My Fair Lady, Around the World In 80 Days and The King and I.

ABC has aired it in connection with the Jewish holiday of Passover and the Christian Easter season, every year since 1973, except in 1999. In theaters, it ran 3 hours and 40 minutes. With commercials, it runs 4 hours and 44 minutes, so it has to begin at 7:00 PM Eastern Time, and pushes back the local 11:00 news. It was usually aired on Palm Sunday or Easter Sunday, but since 2006 has aired on Easter Saturday.

The film tells the story of the Bible's book of Exodus, from the birth to the death of Moses, played as an adult by Charlton Heston. Yul Brynner (who also starred in The King and I) plays the main antagonist, the Pharoah Rameses II (as his name was spelled in the film's credits). The real Ramesses II (as it's usually spelled in English) reigned 66 years, 1279 to 1213 BC, and may not have been as vindictive as Brynner's portrayal; and the Exodus, if it happened at all, may have preceded him.

(An estimated date of 1300 BC has been suggested. This would put it at about 100 years before the Trojan War is said to have been fought, and about 300 years before the time of King David. However, it has been suggested that the loss of hundreds of thousands of people would have been noted in Egyptian records, and the surviving records make no such mention.)

The film is star-studded: Anne Baxter, Edward G. Robinson, Yvonne De Carlo, Debra Paget, John Derek, Cedric Hardwicke, Nina Foch, Judith Anderson and Vincent Price.

In the 1980s, Billy Crystal, himself Jewish, developed a comedy routine about the film, based largely on the campy dialogue, including his belief that Robinson, best known for his gangster roles in the 1930s, should never be in a biblical movie.

I guess he forgot that Robinson was Jewish, born Emanuel Goldenberg. (And, like Price, he was an amateur painter and a major art collector.) What's more, Robinson had been not quite blacklisted, but "graylisted" for alleged Communist activities. The virulently anti-Communist DeMille's casting of him restored his career.

In the years to come, Heston would become a gun rights activist, and it was said by his detractors that he acted as if he thought he really was Moses, bringing the Word of God, and treating the 2nd Amendment like it was one of the Commandments.

In a 2012 episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History, "Nice" Peter Shukoff played Santa Claus, with "Epic" Lloyd Ahlquist played 3 different elves, against rapper Snoop Dogg as Moses.

A movie like The Ten Commandments could not be made today. Not because it would cost so much, or because it reminds us that the Jews were oppressed, but because it reminds us that people believing the lies of a demagogue and worshiping a golden idol look like the bad guys.

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November 8, 1956 was a Thursday. Baseball season was over. Football was in midweek. Although the NBA season had begun, there were no games scheduled for this day.

But the NHL's entire "Original Six" was in action.

* The New York Rangers lost to the Montreal Canadiens, 4-2 at the Montreal Forum. 

* The Boston Bruins beat the Detroit Red Wings, 3-1 at the Boston Garden.

* And the Chicago Black Hawks beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 5-2 at the Chicago Stadium.

October 12, 1960: "The Magnificent Seven" Premieres

Left to right: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Horst Buchholz,

Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter, James Coburn

October 12, 1960: The Magnificent Seven premieres. It is a Western, directed by John Sturges, based on the Japanese film The Seven Samurai, directed by Akira Kurosawa.

The title characters are gunfighters, hired by a small Mexican town to protect them from a gang of bandits, whose leader is played not by a Latino actor, but by the Brooklyn-born Austrian Jew Eli Wallach. (Wallach would also play a Mexican villain opposite Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; and had already played a Japanese interpreter for the U.S. Army in Teahouse of the August Moon.)

The Seven are played by Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter and Horst Buchholz. I won't spoil the movie by telling you which ones survive.

Sturges had directed McQueen before, and wanted him again, but he was starring in the TV Western Wanted Dead or Alive. McQueen, like Paul Newman an avid auto racer, staged an accident, and claimed he needed time off to recover. He got it, and was free to appear. But he and Brynner, by far the 2 biggest stars at the time, did not get along.

Coburn had an affinity for Japanese culture, as he would show many years later as a guest star on The Muppet Show. He claimed to have seen Seven Samurai 15 times, and badly wanted to appear in this version. Vaughn was a friend, and put in a good word for Coburn.

Despite being the leader of the good guys, Brynner's Chris Adams wears all black, much like Zorro does, and like Richard Boone did as Paladin on the then-current TV hit Have Gun -- Will Travel. Brynner would pay homage to this role, playing a robot in Westworld, which spawned a sequel, Futureworld, and a TV series reboot.

Brynner would play Adams again in the 1966 sequel Return of the Seven, but would be replaced in the role by George Kennedy in Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969) and by Lee Van Cleef in The Magnificent Seven Ride (1972).

McQueen died in 1980, from cancer, only 50 years old. Brynner also died from cancer, in 1985, at 65, shortly after filming an anti-smoking commercial, saying, "Now that I'm dead, I'm warning you: Don't smoke." Coburn and Dexter lived until 2002, Bronson and Buchholz until 2003, and Wallach until 2014. Vaughn, later to star as Agent Napoleon Solo on the TV series The Man From U.N.C.L.E., turned out to be the last survivor of the actors, living until 2016, and was the only one of the good guys to outlive Wallach.

A Magnificent Seven TV series aired on CBS from 1998 to 2000, with Michael Biehn playing the leader, there named Chris Larabee. Vaughn played the man who hired the Seven in the pilot. In the 2016 remake, Denzel Washington played the leader, Sam Chisolm.

In 1980, the film Battle Beyond the Stars took the concept to space, with George Peppard playing "Space Cowboy," and Vaughn playing a variation on his character in M7. The planet they're hired to protect is named Akira, in honor of Kurosawa. Peppard would also star as John "Hannibal" Smith in The A-Team, after M7 veteran Coburn turned the part down. That show was devised as a combination of The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen. (Bronson was the only actor to be one of the M7 and the D12.)

Toshiro Mifune was Japan's Steve McQueen, its Harrison Ford, and its Clint Eastwood, before any of those men had become famous in America. In 1954, he starred in Seven Samurai, so he was McQueen as Vin Tanner. In 1958, he starred in The Hidden Fortress, which George Lucas used as a basis for Star Wars, so he was Ford as Han Solo. In 1961, he starred in Yojimbo, which Sergio Leone turned into A Fistful of Dollars, so he was Eastwood as "The Man With No Name." Not that Kurosawa was above doing an homage: In 1957, he made Throne of Blood, set it in feudal-era Japan, and cast Mifune as his Macbeth.

Mifune was in some English-language films, including John Frankenheimer's 1966 Grand Prix, John Boorman's 1968 Hell in the Pacific, and Steven Spielberg's 1979 film 1941. He died in 1997.

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October 12, 1960 was a Wednesday. It was the day of Game 6 of the World Series. Whitey Ford pitches a 7-hit shutout, and singles home the 1st run of a 12-0 New York Yankees rout of the Pittsburgh Pirates at Forbes Field. There will be a Game 7 tomorrow, also in Pittsburgh.

The Yankees had won their 3 games 16-3, 10-0 and 12-0. The Pirates wins had been by scores of 6-4, 3-2 and 5-2. It seems as though a high-scoring game favors the Yankees. And the Yankees will score 9 runs in Game 7, while the Pirates hadn't yet scored more than 5. Sounds like a Yankee title. Except...

Football was in midweek. The NBA season didn't begin until November 1. There was 1 NHL game that day: The Chicago Black Hawks beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 3-0 at the Chicago Stadium.

March 29, 1951: “The King and I” Premieres On Broadway

March 29, 1951: The King and I premieres at the St. James Theatre in New York, based on the 1944 novel Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon. That novel was filmed in 1946, with Rex Harrison as King Mongkut and Irene Dunne as Anna Leonowens.

Both the novel and the musical are full of baloney. But then, the real Anna was something of a con artist herself. Born in 1831 in India, to an English father serving in the army there and a mother who may have been mixed-race, she made up a backstory for herself to hide her true background. She became a teacher, married, had 4 children, and was widowed. She spent some time teaching in Australia and Singapore before being hired by the royal court of Siam in 1862. (The country's name was changed to Thailand in 1939.)

Mongkut was born in 1804, and became King, under the regnal name Rama IV, in 1851. He wanted to give his 39 wives, his concubines, and his 82 children a modern Western education on scientific secular lines, which earlier missionaries' wives had not provided.

Leonowens served at court until 1867, nearly 6 years, first as a teacher, and later as language secretary for the King. Although her position carried great respect, and even a degree of political influence, she did not find the terms and condition her employment to her satisfaction. And, despite her position at the king's court, she was never invited into the social circle of the British merchants and traders of the area. She and the King were never romantically involved. She left not long before his death in 1868. In later life, she was a lecturer of Indology and a suffragist. She died in Montreal in 1915.

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein wrote the musical, and Jerome Robbins choreographed it. It starred Yul Brynner and Gertrude Lawrence. Both would be touched by tragedy with the play: Lawrence already had cancer, and died on September 6, 1952; while Brynner, a lifelong smoker, began playing the role again in 1977, and did so almost continuously despite his own cancer diagnosis in 1983. In spite of the pain, he never let up, doing the full "Shall We Dance?" number with Mary Beth Peil. He died on October 10, 1985, having played Mongkut for the 4,625th and last time on June 30.

Brynner also starred in the 1956 film version, with Deborah Kerr as Anna. As with Natalie Wood in the film version of West Side Story and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, Kerr's singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon. Sadly, these would not remain the most famous recordings by someone named Nixon.

The St. James Theatre still stands, at 246 West 44th Street. Among its other original productions: A theatrical version of Richard Wright's Native Son in 1941, Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! in 1943, Where's Charley? in 1948, The Pajama Game in 1954, Flower Drum Song in 1958, Becket (not a musical) in 1960, Hello, Dolly! in 1964, Barnum in 1980, and the 1st rock opera to be turned into a Broadway play, The Who's Tommy, in 1993. When COVID shut Broadway down, it was hosting a live musical version of Disney's Frozen. It had been running for 2 years, but they had to let it go.

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March 29, 1951 was a Thursday. Nick Ut, the Vietnamese photographer who took the photo of Kim Phuc running through her napalm-bombed village, was born on this day. This was also the day that José Ferrer became the 1st Hispanic actor to receive an Academy Award. I have a separate entry for that event.

Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. There were 2 games in the NBA. The New York Knicks lost to the Syracuse Nationals, 102-80 at the State Fair Coliseum in Syracuse, New York. And the Minneapolis Lakers beat the Rochester Royals, 76-73 at the Minneapolis Auditorium.

There was a Stanley Cup Playoff game that night: The Montreal Canadiens beat the Detroit Red Wings, 1-0 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit. It took until 2:20 of the 3rd overtime before a goal could be found, and Maurice "the Rocket" Richard of the Canadiens found it.