What is it about Hollywood and the Sandal Epic? There are wonderful, human stories in the Bible and the Classics that don't need any embellishment or additional material to make interesting, even great movies. Take "The Story of Ruth" as an example. The real Ruth is a small book (4 chapters) in the Bible with enough material to make a full length movie without the imaginative script writing that "The Story of Ruth" incorporates. There's sex and seduction, (And it came to pass at midnight, that the man was afraid, and turned himself: and, behold, a woman lay at his feet. And he said, Who art thou? And she answered, I am Ruth thine handmaid: spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou art a near kinsman; Ruth 3: 8-9), intrigue (Boaz manipulates his rival into renouncing his claim to Ruth and Naomi's land; Ruth 4: 1-9) and love and faith (for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God; Ruth 1: 16).Instead of sticking to a good story, the movie invents a Ruth who serves as a Priestess of a pagan god, which only serves as a reason to hold a courtroom drama. There are also two klutzy secret agents from the Moab Mossad whose demise is taken straight from the Apocryphal story of "Daniel and Susanna". Traditionally, Ruth is thought to have been a redhead, as were most Moabites. While Elana Eden is a stunning beauty, her hair is the wrong color and too stylishly coiffed for a poor woman of 900 BCE with the occupation of gleaner. In the Bible, Boaz is certainly not the dumb pushover that Stuart Whitman portrays.All of this is likely due to the movie's release in 1960. It's quite possible that Hollywood, in its wisdom, decided that the real Ruth was too raunchy a commodity at the time. Perhaps, instead of this fantasy, someone in our more enlightened era will make a movie that is realistic and follows the original.

I remember seeing this on its first run and its color was marvelous. The human sacrifice scene to the god Moloch was chilling.Of particular interest is the dialogue between Mahlon (Tom Tryon) and Ruth (Elana Eden) about religion. Mahlon, the Hebrew, tries to explain to Ruth, a pagan virgin votary, how his people could worship an invisible God. This deep theological discussion came about because Ruth asked the question. Mahlon gave a wonderful illustrative example.He said: "Imagine that you are soldier in the battlefield and you wish to pray to save your army and for victory. How would you do that?"Ruth answered that she would think of the image of her god and pray. Mahlon then explained that in that case, the god she would be praying to would be invisible.

(*May contain spoilers*) This fine 20th Century Fox production directed by Henry Koster (The ROBE, 1953) is a timeless classic of hope, faith and inspiration based on the book of Ruth in the Bible. The characters are well defined, the cast is superb, and the writing of the script is both literate and meaningful, handling this subject with a deft sensitivity. Add to that the elaborate production values of the Fox studio, color, and wide-screen CinemaScope, an uplifting, rousing music score, and you have a well-mounted film of style and substance. Pretty young Elana Eden shines in her only starring role as Ruth, the Moabite girl who loves a Jew named Mahlon (handsome, stalwart Tom Tryon), marrying him moments before his untimely death, and befriends his elder kinswoman Naomi (Peggy Wood in a finely crafted performance) who embraces her as Ruth becomes part of the family. Now Ruth must choose between the beguiling but mischievous Tobit (Jeff Morrow sparkles in a fine character role), or handsome young stud Boaz (burly Stuart Whitman in an outstanding part) as they both vie for her affections. The film's story is a true celebration of life overcoming the adversities of death and sorrow, and faith overcoming the difficulties of calamities and complications due to ethnic barriers (the Jews were not normally allowed to associate with the Moabites). It also illustrates the conflicts caused by pagan idolatry. The marriage of Ruth to Boaz is a triumph of faith and love, for through this union would come the lineage of King David of Israel, and ultimately, the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, a thousand years later. Highly recommended Biblical classic is literate and faithful to the original story in the Bible.

Twentieth-Century Fox assembled some rather felicitous elements for this production: an attractive cast; a reliable director, apparently teamed with a producer whose taste resulted is a modicum of restraint when dealing with those elements of the script that might have lent themselves to the kind of excess favored by C. B. DeMille; production values that weren't meant to rival the blockbusters of that era, such as "Ben-Hur" and "Spartacus," but still looked pretty handsome on the CinemaScope/DeLuxe Color screen; and one of Franz Waxman's typically lovely scores, which sounded especially good over the stereo sound system at the Santa Monica, California theater where I saw this during its post first-run release.I recall enjoying this film for giving Peggy Wood, then in her late-sixties, a rare opportunity to act on the big screen. I'd been one of her many fans ever since tuning in every week to watch her warm and wise incarnation as "Marta Hansen," the matriarch on one of the earliest and best long-running TV series, "Mama" (based on a beloved best-seller, successfully adapted to the Broadway stage, and eventually filmed, under George Stevens' direction as "I Remember Mama" in 1948, starring Irene Dunne in one of her most memorable screen appearances). As Naomi in "The Story of Ruth," Miss Wood's modest and very human performance gives this film a distinction that garnered many positive reviews. I also recall that TIME magazine had great fun in ridiculing a pagan Moabite temple dance performed by a phalanx of bodybuilders, apparently embarrassing Fox into deleting that sequence, since that scene of those graceless guys clumping around wasn't in the print I saw. I wonder if it will be restored in the upcoming DVD release.