David and Goliath is the Italian peplum version of the Biblical story, best known for featuring an aged Orson Welles as the villain of the piece, a ruthless King Saul who rants and raves in his various guest appearances. As a film, it's surprisingly low budget, a set-bound political piece that lacks the kind of basic spectacle that this genre is known for. It's no comparison to the Hollywood blockbuster version of the story, featuring Gregory Peck, and by comparison it just features minor actors spouting badly-dubbed dialogue with the occasional war sequence thrown in to try to keep viewers awake. It doesn't really work.

In Jerusalem, the wicked King Saul (Orson Welles) is visited by the Prophet Samuel (Edward Hilton) after losing the Arch of the Alliance in a war against Asrod (Furio Meniconi), King of the Philistines. Samuel advises that God is not happy with him and the new king of Jerusalem would come from Bethlehem. Meanwhile the shepherd David (Ivo Payer) loses his sweetheart and soon he is summoned by Samuel to go to Jerusalem as the chosen by God. He becomes King Saul's adviser, but the ambitious Captain Abner (Massimo Serato) plots a scheme to get rid of David, and convinces King Saul to send him as an emissary to meet King Asrod. David is challenged by Asrod to fight against the giant Goliath (Kronos) and the impossible happens: David wins Goliath."David e Golia" is a cheesy Italian epic based on a biblical story from the Old Testament and with the attraction of Orson Welles in the role of King Saul of Jerusalem. The sets are poor, most of the acting is only reasonable but this movie is not bad, for a Sunday afternoon. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "David e Golias" ("David and Goliath")

When Orson Welles did not have anything to eat he had to become an actor in films that are hardly worth, at times, mentioning, and yet he tries to do what he can as an actor to save the film. That's typical in this one. The Bible is badly revisited in an episode that is not that particularly thrilling because too much known. The film more or less understands some political questions and sees in the attack of the Philistines against Israel an allusion to the menace against Israel from its Arab neighbors. But all that is naive. The stone civilization against the metal civilization from the north as Solomon will put it later is hardly seen. A sling and a stone against spears and a sword. This symbolism is present but unexploited. That also means The Semites (and that is a lot more than just the Jews) against those from the North, those who speak the Indo-Iranian languages of Mesopotamia, of Babylon, of Persia. All that is missed, and a lot more. The harp is also present but not used to its tremendous meaning. The oldest harp we know in this region is Sumerian and not Israeli or whatever. Israeli music is derived from that Sumerian music of some fifteen centuries before, and it is David who is going to establish the music school of the Temple, of the Levites, and also ,the singing school that will produce the prosody and the psalmody of the Ancient Testament, two musical forms that are both the results of older traditions and the root of twenty centuries to come. Apart from that the film is naive and primitive. I prefer the version given by Handel in his Saul.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

This cheesy but entertaining sword-and-sandal movie has more in common with the muscleman spectacles being made in Italy at the time than it has with the superior Biblical epics made by Hollywood in the same era, such as "Ben Hur" and "The Ten Commandments." The dialogue is stilted, the acting stiff, and the departures from the Biblical narrative make it unsuitable as a Sunday school lesson (i.e., Jerusalem did not become part of Israel until David conquered it after Saul's death; in one scene the prophet Samuel quotes verses from the Book of Ecclesiastes, which hadn't been written yet). On the credit side, the movie has lots of pretty girls (what's a Biblical epic without scantily clad dancing girls?) and an exciting battle scene. Hilton Edwards (billed as Edward Hilton) hams it up amusingly as Samuel, and an alarmingly obese Orson Welles gives a commanding performance as Saul, showing that life can be tough for a working actor even if you're a genius. Aside from Welles, only the sexy Eleonora Rossi-Drago, as Saul's scheming daughter Merab, manages to create a three-dimensional character. Overall, the acting is so poor that circus strong man Kronos, as Goliath, actually gives one of the better performances even though all he does is grunt.