This film is based entirely on a passage from the life of King David, in which he falls in disgrace before God by engaging with a married woman. Anyone who knows the Bible minimally or has attended Sunday School knows or has heard about this story, so the script doesn't bring us any surprises. What is most pleasing here is to see the humanity and fallibility of David, an anointed king, chosen by God, but who didn't cease to be a human and to make mistakes, for which he was punished.Gregory Peck is the main actor and gives us an intense, human performance. Initially vain to the point of being a braggart, Peck's David turns a victim of his own pride. Neither he, a king, was above the law or immune to divine wrath. It was a work that grew as the film progressed to the end and dramatic tension increased. Susan Hayward is Bathsheba, a married woman, clearly more vivid than the young king she deliberately provokes. The actress is very beautiful, has talent and was surely a good choice for the role. Jayne Meadows (in the role of David's first wife), Raymond Massey (who played the prophet Nathan) and Kieron Moore (the young and dedicated Uriah) were also excellent additions to the cast, fulfilling their roles with great merit.Technically, the film has only minor flaws. Costumes are good and magnificent to look at, but I didn't like that Jewish star always on Peck's chest. I knew that this symbol only became attached to the Jews in the Middle Ages, so that detail stank of anachronism. The sets were excellent and grandiose, as Hollywood got us used to when it comes to biblical epics. The beauty of colors and photography that Technicolor provides are something delicious for our eyes, perhaps even better than many of the digital features we are used to now. Soundtrack is good, but it doesn't stand out as in "Ten Commandments" or "Ben Hur".

In the final decades of Hollywood's classic era there was a long-running series of biblical pictures – grand, sweeping and extremely pious things, for the most part at least. David and Bathsheba, an early example from Fox Studios, is one of the few to break the trend. It takes its story from scripture without deviating from the story as it is told in the bible, and yet it can be viewed as a veiled attack on the tyranny of the Old Testament God.The screenplay was by Philip Dunne, a liberal Catholic, strong critic of HUAC, but certainly not an atheist. His work here is ultimately an appeal to the softer side of religious attitude. It's a script with much meditation and discussion, interspersed with bursts of word-for-word biblical dramatizations. In this context the striking dead of a man for touching the arc of the covenant (and who was only trying to stop it falling on the floor anyway) take on an almost ridiculous quality. By contrast the elaborated dialogue between characters is subtly sophisticated. When the titular lovers first meet the two of them seek each other out with double-meaning small talk. Upon hearing that Bathsheba has only spent six days with her husband he calls it "only six days of your love". "Six days of our marriage" she replies, correcting him in the guise of agreement, allowing him to read between the lines that the marriage is loveless. The picture essentially becomes a drama of extra-marital affair.And it seems the production was cast with that in mind. Susan Hayward is not beautiful in the conventional sense, but she certainly has an alluring presence, and the calm, intelligent demeanour to deliver that dialogue with the necessary implications. Peck was apparently cast because Daryl F. Zanuck thought he had a "biblical face". In actual fact Peck was rather ill at the time (he had a suspected heart attack during filming), and this probably contributed to his hollow-eyed, haunted look from which his performance benefits. And Peck if anything ups the contentiousness of Dunne's screenplay, with more than a hint of sarcasm in his voice as he complains that "we don't have any Joshua to blow the walls down for us". The forces of Old Testament fire and brimstone are represented by Raymond Massey, and you could hardly get a more biblical face than his skull-thin, piercing-eyed visage. An unexpected treat here is James Robertson Justice, a bit of a fixture in biblical epics, often theatrical but disappointingly vague. Here he is the best I have ever seen him, underplaying Abishai as a sober moral conscience with the sense not to fully speak his mind.And if you wanted a respected, mainstream director who would give an atypical look to an atypical picture you could not do much better than Henry King. As usual King films the set designs (which seem authentically barren compared to the more opulent biblical epics) to create dark, claustrophobic interiors. He often has one wall running down the side of the frame right up to the camera, some object in the foreground creating an area of shadow across the bottom of the screen, or his characters with their backs in a corner. In the scene where Bathsheba has her miscarriage he uses all these techniques at once to produce some particularly stifling images. Spartan as the sets are, King gives them a life of their own with billowing curtains and spare bits of decoration prominently picked out. And then, at some key moment he will arrange thing to draw all focus in upon the protagonists, never allowing them to blend completely into the background.The only major trouble with David and Bathsheba is that pictures like this are most entertaining when, rather than trying to engage sensibly with their archaic subject matter, they went all out on spectacle and extravagance. That's why Cecil B. DeMille was so good at them. Nevertheless it remains an intriguing and refreshing take upon the genre. It was during a 1964 broadcast of this picture that the controversial yet breathtakingly powerful "Daisy girl" campaign ad was shown for the first and only time (look it up if you haven't seen it). Perhaps this is pure coincidence, or perhaps the slot was chosen because it was thought a lot of people would be watching. But it does seem that the campaign's fervent plea for peace and understanding in the face of arbitrary destructiveness chimes in very well with the message of David and Bathsheba.

Watching David&Bathsheba is a much better way of getting your bible lesson that going to Sunday school. Despite a script that at times is unintentionally funny the film is highly entertaining. The studio system had its faults but it spared no expense when a lavish production was called for. Peck portrays King David as a lusty but tormented poet who commits what is tantamount to murder to bed a sexy Bathsheba, Susan Hayward. Raymond Massey as the prophet Nathan delivers his usual saturnine and ferocious performance. Look for the silent screen star Francis X. Bushman as King Saul and a young Gwen Verdon as a dancer. Hooray for the Old Testament and Hollywood.

I've always believed that David and Bathsheba was a film originally intended for Tyrone Power at 20th Century Fox, although Gregory Peck does give a good account of himself as King David, the monarch with a wandering eye.A whole lot of biblical subjects get covered in this film, adultery, redemption, sin, punishment and generally what God expects from his followers.When you're a king, even king in a biblically prophesied kingdom you certainly do have a lot of prerogatives not open to the rest of us. King David has many wives, including one really vicious one in Jayne Meadows who was the daughter of Saul, David's predecessor. But his eyes catch sight of Bathsheba out in her garden one evening. Turns out she's as unhappily married to Uriah the Hittite as David is to quite a few women. Uriah is one of David's army captains. David sends for Bathsheba and him being the King, she comes a runnin' because she's had her eye on him too.What happens, an affair, a pregnancy, and a carefully arranged death for Uriah in a battle. But an all seeing and knowing Deity has caught all of this and is not only punishing David and Bathsheba, but the entire Kingdom of Israel is being punished with drought, disease, and pestilence.The sexist law of the day calls for Bathsheba to have a stoning death. David shows weakness in his previous actions, but here he steps up to the plate and asks that the whole thing be put on him. He even lays hands on the Ark of the Covenant which was an instant death as seen in the film.My interpretation of it is that God admires guts even if you're wrong and he lets up on David and forgives them both. Bathsheba becomes the mother of Solomon and she and David are the ancestors of several successors in the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah until they're both conquered.Susan Hayward is a fetching Bathsheba caught in a loveless marriage with Uriah played by Kieron Moore. The only thing that gets Moore aroused is a good battle. I liked Kieron Moore's performance as a brave and rather stupid horse's rear. No one can lay the law down like Raymond Massey. His Nathan the Prophet is in keeping with the John Brown character he played in two films, same intensity. So when His own law called for death, why did God spare Bathsheba and keep David on the throne. Maybe it was the fact He just didn't want to train a third guy for the job. He'd replaced Saul with David already. But I think the Christian interpretation might be that this was a hint of the New Testament forthcoming, that one might sin and receive mercy if one asks for it penitently. I'll leave it to the biblical scholars to submit interpretations.Watch the film and you might come up with an entirely new theory.