The story of Noah's Ark is used to illustrate the evil ways of modern man and a lot of stuff gets wrecked in this very impressive Warner Brother's production.
A big film for the studio. Daryl F. Zanuck who was in charge of the production and the director Michael Curtiz used just about everything they knew about film making when it came to mounting this production.
Noah's Ark appears to have been conceived as an attempt to copy the success of Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 production of The Ten Commandments. DeMille's film, had used a long prologue to tell the story of Moses and the Israelites escape from Egypt. The Ten Commandments were used to dramatize the sins being committed in the modern world.
Noah's Ark shows that Zanuck and Curtiz had carefully studied DeMille's film and then attempted to out do it. Their film opens with a modern story and then travels back into time to show how the story of Noah and the flood correspond to modern life.
Michael Curtiz one of Hollywood's best directors filmed the story with his usual dazzling technique. Curtiz used his skill with composition and editing to move the story along at top speed. Noah's Ark has an amazing flood sequence towards the end of the picture that really pushed the boundaries of special effects. The flood disaster was apparently a little too exciting, four extras were killed during the filming of this sequence.
The film features a couple of popular silent stars, George O'Brien and Dolores Costello. O'Brien was a leading man of the 1920's and had done a lot of work for John Ford, he was sort of an early version of John Wayne. Dolores Costello a major silent film star of the 1920's, was considered one of the great beauties of the silent screen, the woman certainly knew how to take a close up.
Noah's Ark is really an impressive film. Besides the flood sequence there is a spectacular train wreck and a World War I battle scene all filmed with tremendous skill. Curtiz was a director who knew how to put a film together, there's not a dull moment in the entire picture
100 minutes.
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