Michael O’ Sajbel | Through the Shattered Lens

The 2006 Biblical film, One Night With The King, opens with God ordering King Saul to conquer and execute all of the Amalekites and their livestock. However, as so often happened whenever God ordered him to do something, Saul manages to screw everything up. He does conquer the Amalekites but he decides to keep their best livestock for himself and he also declines to execute the Amalekite king or his pregnant wife. The prophet Samuel (played by an uncomfortably frail-looking Peter O’Toole) shows up and tells Saul that he’s screwed up for the last time. Samuel goes off to execute the Amalekite king. However, the queen escapes into the desert.

And that’s the last we see of her. It’s also the last we see of O’Toole who, despite being top billed, has about a minute of screen time.

Jump forward several hundred years. We are now in the city of Susa, Persia. It’s the center of the known world. We know this because characters tend to say stuff like, “We are living in the center of the known world.” Xerxes (Luke Goss) is the king of Persia, a somewhat uncouth man who is obviously used to getting everything that he wants. Xerxes is plotting on marching off to war. However, his current wife is opposed to the war and refuses to attend Xerxes’s pre-war banquet. Scandal! Xerxes’s advisor, Prince Memucan (Omar Sharif, who co-starred with Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia), suggests that perhaps Xerxes should get a new wife.

Every female virgin in the city is brought to Xerxes’s palace so that, under the watchful eye of the king’s eunuch, Hegai (Tommy Lister, Jr.), they can compete for the chance to become queen. Among the women is the beautiful Hadassah (Tiffany Dupont), who is the niece of one of the king’s scribes, Mordecai (John Rhys-Davies). Hadassah does not tell the king that she’s related to Mordecai and instead says that her name is Esther. With the help of Hegai, Hadassah soon emerges as the favorite to become the new queen.

Meanwhile, an evil man named Haman (Boo! Haman! Boo!) has shown up on the scene. Haman (played by James Callas) is a descendant of the Amalekites that Saul failed to destroy. (Dammit, Saul!) A greedy astrologer, Haman (Boo!) has been appointed to the position of vizier by Xerxes. Haman (hiss!) demands that all of the king’s servants bow before him. However, because he has a pagan symbol sewn onto his clothes, Mordecai refuses to do so. Driven by hate (Boo!), Haman makes plans to execute not only Mordecai but every other Jew in Persia. With the king unaware of Haman’s intentions, only Hadassah can stop his plans but to do so, she’ll have to risk seeing the king unsummoned….

The story of Esther, Mordecai, the king, and the moment that Haman (Boo!) discovers that karma is a bitch has always been one of my favorites so I’ve always enjoyed One Night With The King whenever I’ve watched it. Don’t get me wrong. It has its flaws. Though the film does a pretty good job of recreating the past on a low budget, it’s still one of those films that’s full of awkward exposition, cringe-worthy dialogue, and more than a few inconsistent performances. (Sharif and O’Toole, for instance, both go through the motions, doing just enough to pick up a paycheck.) At the same time, Luke Goss is properly rough-around-the-edges as the king and Tiffany DuPont is well-cast as Hadassah. Tommy Lister, Jr. appears to be having a lot of fun in the role of the world’s most unlikely eunuch and, as a result, he’s entertaining to watch. Visually, it’s a pretty film and the costumes are to die for, as they should be in any film about a royal romance. And, even if the story is at times awkwardly told, it still reaches a deeply satisfying conclusion.

James Callas is convincingly evil and properly detestable as Haman (Boo! Haman! Boo!). Haman is an archetype of evil, the ant-Semite whose evil legacy has continued to haunt the world in the centuries since he met his own fate. Though the film at times spends too much time playing up the romance between the king and Hadassah (which, while nice to watch, is not the point of the source material), One Night With The King does include enough scenes of Haman (hiss!) ranting to make clear the link between Haman and the anti-Semitism of the Nazis and those modern day hate mongers who try to hide their bigotry behind claims that they are “only criticizing Israel.” Haman’s evil makes his final fate all the more satisfying but the film leaves no doubt that, unless the world remains vigilant, there will always be new Hamans threatening to come to power. That’s an important enough message to make up for many of the film’s missteps.

One Night With The King is a flawed, low-budget film. But I like it.

“Do you own a horse?”

Because I was born and live in Texas, a friend of mine used to ask me that constantly. His assumption was that everyone in Texas wore a cowboy hat and rode a horse to work. That, of course, is not true. I imagine that you’re more likely to see people on horseback in Central Park than you are in downtown Dallas. As well, for the most part, if you see anyone wandering around Dallas wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, chances are that they’re from up north. Northerners love to come down to Dallas and see where Kennedy was shot and ask if everything really is bigger in Texas. It gets annoying after a while. Of course, I’d by lying if I said that there weren’t any cowboys in Texas. And yes, there are people down here who own horses. We’ve got our ranchers and our oilmen and our farmers. We just don’t have as many as people up in Minnesota seem to assume that we do.

And, to be honest, I’ve known a few cowboys. If you dig around my family tree, you’ll find a few people who have worked the rodeo circuit. For the most part, the cowboys I’ve known have been a proud group of people. They’re not really emotional and they might not spend much time on twitter but you can depend on them to get the job done without a lot of crying and that’s always kind of a nice thing.

As an actor, Michael Biehn has always seemed uniquely right for cowboy roles. He’s a low-key actor who doesn’t feel the need to always be the center of attention and who does his job with a minimum amount of fuss. What he does, he does well. Much like the best cowboys, an actor like Michael Biehn often gets taken for granted. Viewers just always assume that he’ll always be there, delivering laconic one-liners and viewing the world through weary but never defeated eyes.

Michael Biehn plays a cowboy in the 1997 film, The Ride. His name is Smokey Banks and he’s the type of character who, if you’ve ever spent any time at a rodeo, you’ll recognize immediately. He used to be one of the world’s greatest bull riders but now, he’s getting older. He still walks like a cowboy but he’s definitely moving a bit slower than he used to. He drinks too much. He spends too much time with the buckle bunnies. He’s like a downbeat country song come to life.

But fear not …. redemption is coming for Smokey. And, like all good redemption arcs, it all starts with being sentenced to community service. Smokey can either go to jail or he can go to a ranch and teach a bunch of boys how to be a cowboy. Along the way, he befriends a terminally ill, religious young man (Brock Pierce) who wants to learn how to ride a bull and he also ends up spending some time at a tent revival. Yes, it’s a religious film but, fortunately, it was made before the whole God’s Not Dead phenomenon so it never gets as preachy or apocalyptic as some other faith-based films. One gets the feeling that Smokey would find Kirk Cameron to be as annoying as the rest of us do.

It’s a sweet film. I mean, it’s not a movie that’s going to surprise you. It’s unapologetic about being sentimental but, at the same time, it’s such a good-natured film that it’s hard to really dislike it. Michael Biehn grounds the film with his typically low-key charm. Biehn turns Smokey into a real person and, as much as you might try to resist, it’s hard not to get swept up in his emotional journey. Considering that the film’s audience was probably limited to kids and church groups, Biehn easily could have gotten away with just phoning in his performance. That’s the sign of a good actor, though. Like the best cowboys, they’re good even when they don’t have to be.