Cinema: Holiday in Haganah

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Judith is the misleading Old Testament title of a film that ought to be called Sophia Loren's Israel. Based on a story by Lawrence Durrell, it is set in Palestine in 1948, just before the departure of the British gives the go sign to encircling Arab armies. A tireless sound track thumps music to feel humane by (folk themes, mostly), and Director Daniel Mann brings on the folks: Peter Finch, whose kibbutz is a hotbed of nationalist fervor; Jack Hawkins, as a British major who enforces the rules with leathery compassion; and a full quota of illegal immigrants who wade ashore and scoop up handfuls of soil.

Over all looms the monumental reality of Sophia, a star not easily eclipsed by the shadow of struggling statehood. Sophia plays an Austrian Jew smuggled into the country to help the Israelis find her hated husband, a German war criminal who is now chief strategist for the Arabs' tank corps. She arrives suitably sweaty and distraught, stowed away in a packing case with a power lathe and a corpse. Moments later, her fabulous eye makeup intact, she rackets off to tantalize Finch, soon dons bikini-brief work clothes that scandalize his dedicated kibbutzniks. Her subsequent search leads to Haifa, Damascus, and other Levantine fun spots. Though she occasionally sounds the depths of a woman's revenge, Sophia sticks mainly to Byzantine surface effects. As the farewell gesture of a hollow drama that might have been something more, the young Jewish nation rather incidentally survives the first Arab onslaught—saved by an eyelash, so it seems.