Solomon and Sheba (1959) - 20 Hidden Facts Nobody Knows

[00:00:00]This is the story of a biblical epic that lost its leading man halfway through filming and still managed to reach theaters. These are 20 hidden facts about Solomon and Sheba, the 1959 spectacle that ended up far more famous for the tragedy behind the camera than for anything that ever reached the screen. If you love this film, you already know it as a big gaudy Technicolor slice of old Hollywood, a sword and sandal romance drawn loosely from the 10th chapter of 1st Kings and the 9th chapter of 2nd Chronicles, complete with a queen, a king, a war, and a scandalous dance. It runs about 2 hours and 21 minutes. It was shot in the wide lush process of Supertechnirama, and it opened in glorious 70 mm.

[00:00:40]Underneath that glossy surface though, sits one of the strangest production stories in movie history, a tale of sudden death, a vanishing star, a million-dollar gamble, and a director who spent the rest of his life insisting that the film you are watching is not the film he set out to make. This picture had also been a long time coming. Producer Edward Small first announced plans for a King Solomon movie all the way back in 1953, and a screenwriter named Julius Epstein was drafting a version for him by 1954.

[00:01:08]Gina Lollobrigida joined the project in November of 1955, and United Artists agreed to distribute it in 1956.

[00:01:15]By the time cameras finally rolled, this was a movie that had passed through several writers and studios before it ever reached a sound stage, which only makes what happened next more devastating. The finished film would carry a score composed by Mario Nascimbene and conducted by Franco Ferrara, with a handful of extra musical cues quietly written by an uncredited Malcolm Arnold. Every department, in other words, arrived stacked with real talent. Nobody planned a disaster. Let's get into it, counting down 20 things you probably never knew about Solomon and Sheba. Fact number one, the last film of a Hollywood giant. Before we get anywhere near the tragedy, you need to understand who was steering this ship.

[00:01:55]King Vidor directed Solomon and Sheba, and this turned out to be his final theatrical feature. Let that land for a second. Vidor ranked among the true titans of American cinema, a man whose directing career reached all the way back to the silent era. Five separate times the Academy nominated him for best director, and astonishingly, he never won a single one of those races. He would eventually collect an honorary Academy Award in 1979 for a lifetime of work, and he holds a Guinness record for one of the longest directing careers ever recorded, stretching from 1913 all the way to 1980. After Solomon and Sheba, Vidor never mounted another theatrical feature. He worked only on short and documentary projects for the rest of his life, closing out with a short called The Metaphor in 1980, and he died on November 1st, 1982. The film we are discussing today, then, is no minor footnote in his career. It stands as the closing chapter of one of the longest and most decorated directing lives Hollywood has ever produced. Here is what makes it ache. This was not the ending Vidor wanted, because he came to see the movie as a wounded, compromised version of what it should have been. A master's final statement hijacked by a catastrophe nobody could have predicted, and every fact that follows is, in some way, part of the reason his last picture became his biggest regret. Fact number two. The original Solomon was never Yul Brynner. Here is the fact that reshapes how you watch the whole movie. That bald, commanding Yul Brynner you see ruling as King Solomon was never the first choice. And this was not even the second version of the production. Tyrone Power, one of the biggest matinee idols of his generation, originally filled the role of Solomon. Power did not simply sign on as an actor collecting a paycheck. He put real skin in the game as a co-producer. Edward Small Productions built the film in partnership with Copa Productions, and Copa belonged to Tyrone Power himself, run day-to-day by producer Ted Richmond.

[00:03:49]United Artists handled distribution, while the financing revealed just how much risk sat on the production side, with Edward Small covering roughly 75% of the anticipated budget and United Artists supplying the remaining 25%. The screenplay had already traveled through many hands during the long development with figures like Clarence Green, Russell Rouse, and Arthur Hornblow Jr.

[00:04:10]circling the material at various points before the final draft came together credited to Anthony Veiller, Paul Dudley, and George Bruce. Working from a story by Crane Wilbur. That is how much creative energy had already poured into this thing before Power ever stepped in front of a camera. Signing on to play the wise king of Israel meant Power was staking both his famous face and his own business on the outcome. This whole enterprise existed as a showcase for him. A grand epic built around his star power and years in the making.

[00:04:39]Everything you are about to hear flows from one brutal fact, that the man this movie was designed around never lived to finish it.

[00:04:46]Fact number three. The leading lady was also a financial partner. Opposite Solomon playing the Queen of Sheba stood the Italian screen icon Gina Lollobrigida and most people watching never clocked the truth about her role.

[00:04:59]>> [music] >> Lollobrigida was not just the female lead. She came aboard as a financial partner taking a percentage of the profits and her costumes fittingly for a queen carried the label of the celebrated house of Schuberth of Rome.

[00:05:11]That financial stake handed her genuine power over the project and it tangled everything once disaster struck. When the production later faced agonizing choices about survival, three separate parties held approval rights over the film, namely Edward Small, Copa Productions, and Gina Lollobrigida herself. Three separate sets of interests now sat at that table, each one demanding its own signature and guarding something different. The queen on screen doubled off screen as one of the people who got to decide whether the whole venture lived or died. Around her worked a deep bench of respected character actors, Marisa Pavan, David Farrar, Harry Andrews, John Crawford, and Laurence Naismith among them. The kind of sturdy ensemble that signaled to everyone in 1958 that this was serious prestige filmmaking. Hold on to those competing interests because they turned an already impossible situation into a negotiating nightmare.

[00:06:03]Fact number four. It was shot in Spain, and that [music] put Spain on the map.

[00:06:08]Filming took place in Spain in and around Madrid, including the Sevilla Film Studios and out at Valdespartera near Zaragoza in the region of Aragon.

[00:06:17]Spain earned the job for a very practical reason because the country could supply the enormous numbers of horses the production needed for its battle sequences. For the huge cavalry and combat scenes, the filmmakers even drew on Spanish army personnel, and the picture credited a Spanish army chief staff officer as its military adviser.

[00:06:35]This was no movie faking its scale on a backlot. It mounted real logistics across real terrain. The shoot itself turned brutal. Cold temperatures and biting easterly winds hammered the outdoor locations, and much of the crew, Tyrone Power very much included, suffered through bouts of dysentery.

[00:06:52]>> [music] >> Physically punishing describes this production long before any tragedy arrived, and that context matters enormously for what came next. Here is the piece film buffs treasure. Freddie Young operated the camera, and if that name rings a bell, it should. Young would later become one of the most celebrated cinematographers in film history, shooting future masterpieces like Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. This messy troubled epic quietly holds early work from a coming legend of the craft. The economical, large-scale Spanish production on Solomon and Sheba also helped convince Hollywood to lean on Spain as a filming base in the years that followed, which means a movie remembered mostly for going wrong actually helped reshape where the industry built its epics.

[00:07:36]Fact number five. The star died filming a sword fight. Now we reach the moment that defines this entire film. On November 15th, 1958, Tyrone Power collapsed and died on the set in Madrid at the age of 44, felled by a massive heart attack. The circumstances chill you. Power was shooting a dueling scene, a sword fight, against his co-star George Sanders, who played his brother Adonijah. That duel demanded take after take. [music] Halfway through, Power dropped his sword, complained of pain in his left arm, and let himself be helped to his dressing room where someone handed him brandy. Accounts of what happened over the next few minutes split apart, and honesty demands acknowledging that. One version puts him in Gina Lollobrigida's car, driven toward the hospital, dying on the way. Another has him dying in the dressing room. And in one especially grim telling, a scarf went around his neck to keep his jaw from dropping as crew members walked him out to a car because his wife still sat back at the hotel with no idea what had happened.

[00:08:33]The details blur, the way they so often do in the panic of a real tragedy. What nobody disputes is the outcome. That one of Hollywood's most beloved leading men was gone in the middle of production, moments after finishing a strenuous fight scene under hot lights. The physician who examined him, a doctor named Juan Olaguibel, called it fulminant angina pectoris. In the immediate chaos, producer Ted Richmond reportedly ordered that no press be called, an attempt to hold the lid on while the people closest to Power absorbed the unthinkable. The star of the film and one of its producers, the very man whose company was co-making it, had died, and the whole machine of a multi-million dollar epic ground to a halt around his body. Fact number six, the fatal duel was actually a rematch. A haunting piece of trivia hides inside that fatal scene. This was not the first time Tyrone Power and George Sanders had crossed swords on camera. Because the two actors had already staged a sword fight together years earlier in the 1942 film The Black Swan. Sit with that for a moment. 16 years apart, these two men fought screen duels against each other.

[00:09:39]The first was pure movie magic, a bit of swashbuckling adventure, >> [music] >> while the second, the same two actors with blades drawn once more, became the last thing Tyrone Power ever performed.

[00:09:50]The sword fight that once existed as light entertainment turned, on its rematch, into the setting for a real death. Write that into a screenplay and an audience would call it too much. The moment stayed with Sanders for the rest of his life. He wrote movingly about Power, about their friendship, and about that terrible day on the set in his own 1960 memoir, Memoirs of a Professional Cad, a first-hand account from the very man standing across from Power, sword in hand, when it happened. Something almost unbearably intimate lies in that. These two had built a working relationship across nearly two decades of Hollywood, from swashbuckling adventure to biblical epic, and it ended with Sanders as the last person Power ever shared a scene with. When you watch the sword fight that survives in the finished film, reshot, of course, with Brenner, you are watching an echo of a partnership that reached all the way back to the 1940s, and closed in the worst way imaginable.

[00:10:42]Fact number seven. He had just filmed a heart health warning. If the sword fight coincidence unsettled you, this one lands even harder. Not long before Tyrone Power left for Spain to make Solomon and Sheba, he filmed a public service announcement for the American Heart Association. The subject of that announcement makes it almost cruel. It warned viewers about the dangers of overexertion and urged people to get their hearts checked. Power lent his famous face to a message telling ordinary Americans to take their heart health seriously, and to avoid pushing their bodies too hard, then traveled overseas into a punishing shoot, threw himself into the physical demands of an epic, battled the cold and the wind and illness, performed a grueling sword fight across multiple takes, and died of a heart attack at 44. The man who told the public to be careful became a tragic illustration of the exact danger he had been hired to warn against. Once you know that fact, you can never quite unknow it while watching him on screen.

[00:11:36]A terrible unintended poignancy now clings to that little public service message. Here stood a healthy-looking movie star at the peak of his fame, the very picture of vitality, urging people to respect their own hearts. And within a short stretch of time, the same condition took him. His death, if anything, turned that quiet announcement into one of the most sobering warnings the American Heart Association could ever have hoped to air. Delivered at the most heartbreaking cost imaginable.

[00:12:02]Fact number eight. His father died the very same way. The tragedy digs even deeper into the Power family history because Tyrone Power was not the first actor in his family to die of a heart attack on a film set. His father, the actor Tyrone Power Sr., died the same way while working on a film back in 1931.

[00:12:21]Here is the detail that makes it genuinely devastating. His father reportedly died in his son's arms decades before Tyrone Power collapsed in Madrid. In other words, he had already lived through the identical nightmare from the other side, cradling his own father as a heart attack took him on a movie set. Two generations of the same acting dynasty, both struck down the same way, both while making movies. That piece of family history lends Power's death on Solomon and Sheba an almost mythic weight, a fate that seemed to shadow the family name across an entire generation of Hollywood. Fact number nine. Most of the movie was already finished. Here is what turned a personal tragedy into a full-blown production catastrophe. Tyrone Power did not die in the early days of the shoot. According to Turner Classic Movies, after roughly 6 weeks of filming across the sweltering Madrid locations, about 75% of Solomon and Sheba already sat, in their phrase, in the can. Three quarters of the movie stood finished, and every bit of it had been built around Tyrone Power as Solomon. One unusual production choice made the the thing even more complicated. The enormous crowd scenes had reportedly been shot first, which meant Power had already completed a great deal of the massive expensive material before his death. The producers were not staring at a project they could quietly shelve. They were holding a mostly finished, hugely costly epic with a dead leading man at the center of nearly every important scene. That left them facing an agonizing menu of options, and the roads not taken fascinate me. One possibility involved rewriting the script to use the footage Power had already shot. Another kept Power for the first half of the film as a young Solomon and recast the role for the second half. A third brutal path simply canceled the entire production and collected the insurance money. Every choice carried enormous consequences, and remember, no single person could decide alone since Edward Small, Copa Productions, and Gina Lollobrigida all held approval. Picture the room where those conversations happened. A leading man dead, a fortune already sunk into the ground, an insurance policy dangling the option to walk away with the money, and three parties who all had to agree on any path forward.

[00:14:29]>> [music] >> The decision could have gone a dozen different ways. The one they finally chose, keeping the film, recasting the lead, and reshooting, ranks as the boldest and most expensive of them all.

[00:14:39]The question had shifted, no longer whether they had lost their star, but whether they could salvage anything from the fortune they had already spent. If a Hollywood legend dying three quarters of the way through a nearly finished epic just dropped your jaw, do us a favor and tap that like button and subscribe because what the producers did next to rescue this movie is even harder to believe than how it fell apart.

[00:15:01]Fact number 10. The replacement had already turned it down. The producers needed someone to save a doomed epic, and they turned to Yul Brynner.

[00:15:10]Here is the twist most people miss, though. Brynner had been connected to this role once before, and he had turned it down flat. One day after Power's death, on November 16th, 1958, Edward Small offered the part of Solomon to Brynner, who happened to count Tyrone Power as a friend. Having refused the first time, Brynner now accepted.

[00:15:29]Picture the strange, heavy position that created for him, stepping into a role he had already rejected inside a film built entirely around a dead friend, knowing that every scene he shot would replace footage of a man who had just lost his life playing the very same king. Small wonder that, as we will hear later, several people involved felt Brynner never fully settled into the part, that he wore a kind of armor instead of the vulnerability the director wanted. In truth, it is hard to imagine it going any other way. He was not merely learning a new role. The reality cut deeper because he took it on under a spotlight of grief, on a set still reeling from loss, with the entire financial future of an expensive production suddenly resting on his shoulders. Whatever you make of his performance, the circumstances he walked into rank among the hardest any actor has ever faced. Fact number 11. Saying [music] yes meant giving up Spartacus.

[00:16:22]Taking over Solomon and Sheba cost Yul Brynner something real in his own career, and it involved one of the most famous films of the era. To step in as Solomon, Brynner had to drop out of a planned production of Spartacus that he was already committed to. That project did not vanish. It became the 1960 Spartacus, the towering epic that ended up starring Kirk Douglas. By rushing to Spain to rescue this troubled biblical film, in other words, Brynner walked away from one of the most iconic historical epics ever made. The what if practically writes itself.

[00:16:53]>> [music] >> The role of Solomon landed in Brynner's lap because of a tragedy, and it ties directly to him releasing his grip on a part in a movie that turned into a genuine classic. A trade struck in the span of a single day under the shadow of a friend's death that quietly rerouted several careers at once. Think about the dominoes here. Power dies, Brynner steps in, and because Brynner steps in, he leaves Spartacus. Once he leaves Spartacus, the door stays open for the version everyone knows. One heart attack on a Spanish film set did not just reshape Solomon and Sheba. It sent ripples through an entire era of epic filmmaking, brushing against movies that on the surface look completely unrelated. That is how tightly wound old Hollywood really was. Fact number 12.

[00:17:35]Tyrone Power was erased from the finished film. This ranks among the most poignant facts of the whole story. Once Brynner took over, he reshot essentially all of Tyrone Power's scenes across roughly the next 10 weeks, rebuilding an entire lead performance from scratch. A specific, cold, contractual reason explains why Power's work vanished so completely. The insurer, Lloyd's of London, reportedly set one condition on the payout, that Tyrone Power could not appear in the finished film. The money that rescued the production then arrived with a price attached, the erasure of the dead star. This is the spot where accounts turn murky, >> [music] >> and fairness demands saying so plainly.

[00:18:13]Some sources claim fragments of Power's footage still survive in the final cut, glimpsed in distant long shots during the huge battle scenes. Others [music] insist they have searched and never once spotted him for certain, and a few believe none of his footage survives at all. One thing sits beyond dispute, that no Tyrone Power footage from this production has ever surfaced on any home video edition. There is also a single lingering fingerprint of the frantic reshoots that sharp-eyed fans love to point out, a continuity glitch in which a dead character lies with eyes closed in footage shot without Brynner, yet lies with eyes open in the two shots that include Brynner. A tiny seam runs through the fabric right there, a place where two different versions of the same movie got stitched together. The performance Tyrone Power was midway through when he died has for every practical purpose disappeared, painted over by 10 weeks of desperate reshooting.

[00:19:04]Fact number 13. Power wasn't the only actor recast. Tyrone Power understandably grabs all the attention, yet he was not the only actor swapped out after his death. A second quieter recasting slipped past most viewers entirely. Veteran actor Noel Purcell had already filmed the role of King David alongside Tyrone Power. Once the production rebuilt itself around Yul Brynner though, Finlay Currie replaced Purcell in that role of King David. The reshoots did not stop at the lead. In other [music] words, the ripple from Power's death reached into the supporting cast, too. Quietly rewriting who shows up in the finished movie.

[00:19:41]Watching Finlay Currie play King David means watching a replacement for the original scene partner of the man who himself got replaced. One more layer of the film's first version painted over.

[00:19:51]That detail carries a bigger reminder that when the star at the center of a production falls, the shockwave never stops with him. It travels outward and reshapes the whole ensemble around the hole he leaves behind. Spare a thought, too, for Noel Purcell, an actor who had done his job, filmed his scenes as King David opposite one of the biggest stars in the world, and then through no fault of his own, watched that work quietly discarded in the rebuild. His performance became another casualty of the reshoots. A finished piece of acting that almost nobody will ever see. Two lost performances lie buried inside this movie. Really, [music] not one. Tyrone Power's and Noel Purcell's right beside it.

[00:20:28]Fact number 14, they insured a life for $3 million.

[00:20:33]Let's talk money because the numbers stagger you for the era. $3 million.

[00:20:37]That was the figure the production carried in insurance against the death of any one of its six lead players.

[00:20:43]When Tyrone Power died, that policy became the lifeline that kept the film breathing, and it explains why cancel and collect the insurance even qualified as a serious option. On top of that ceiling, while production sat halted in the chaos after Power's death, Lloyd's of London reportedly absorbed the cost of the shutdown, which ran around $100,000 per day. Just sit with that figure for a second. $100,000 every single day purely to keep the production frozen in place while everyone worked out what to do. The financial machinery behind an epic like this reached a staggering scale, a stark reminder that a star dying mid-shoot amounted to far more than a human tragedy. It amounted to a catastrophic business event, one that only elaborate insurance could ever absorb. In a very real sense, Lloyd's of London made finishing the movie possible at all.

[00:21:32]Fact number 15, Brynner's rescue came with a million-dollar price tag. If rescuing the film demanded money on one side, it demanded just as much on the other. Yul Brynner, [music] according to Turner Classic Movies, agreed to a million-dollar payday for stepping in and completing Solomon and Sheba. The figure staggers even now. A million dollars at the tail end of the 1950s bought a leading man willing to walk onto a grieving set and rebuild a starring role from the ground up. The overall cost of the movie ballooned dramatically along the way. Envisioned at around $4 million, the production swelled to roughly $6 million by the time it wrapped. Death, delay, 10 weeks of reshoots, $100,000 a day during the halt, and a million-dollar fee for the new star. All of it piled onto a budget that spiraled far past the original plan. Keep in mind that most of that original financing came out of Edward Small's own pocket rather than the studios, which sharpened the sting of every overrun. What you are watching in Solomon and Sheba then is one of the most expensive salvage operations in classic Hollywood history.

[00:22:35]>> [music] >> A film that cost a fortune to make and then cost a second fortune to survive.

[00:22:40]Fact number 16, his final flight home was arranged by Howard Hughes. Before we swing back to the film itself, one last human detail from the aftermath, >> [music] >> and it pulls in one of the most famous names in American history. After Tyrone Power died, his body flew home to the United States aboard a plane sent by the reclusive aviation tycoon Howard Hughes.

[00:23:01]A Morse memorial tied to Power's own service history followed as well. On November 16th, the day after he died, mourners held a memorial service in Spain honoring Power, who had served as a Marine Corps pilot in World War II, at a United States Air Force base.

[00:23:16]>> [music] >> His body then came home for burial at Hollywood Memorial Park on November 21st, 1958. The timeline carries one final ache. Power's wife, Deborah, was pregnant when he died, and their son, Tyrone Power IV, arrived in the world on January 22nd, 1959. A child born only after his father was already gone. A father who died making the very film we are discussing. He would grow up knowing his dad only through the movies, including the one his father never got to finish. If these behind-the-scenes stories are quietly rewriting how you see this movie, drop a comment telling us which fact hit you the hardest, >> [music] >> and subscribe so the next classic film deep dive lands right in your feed, because the movie itself still has a few surprises left. Fact number 17. The infamous orgy scene honored a pagan god.

[00:24:05]Let's turn to the film that actually reached the screen because it holds its own notorious moments. Many fans remember Solomon and Sheba for one sequence above all, a lavish scandalous love festival, and real detail sits behind it. Inside the story, that celebration honors a pagan god named Ragon. Jaroslav Berger, the ballet chief of the Bern State Theater in Switzerland, choreographed the sequence, and Gina Lollobrigida rehearsed her dance for it across more than a month.

[00:24:32]An extraordinary stretch of preparation for a single scene that tells you how central the producers knew it would be to the film's appeal. All of it unfolded over that lush Mario Nascimbene score, lending the whole spectacle the sweep of grand opera. Daring enough for its time to draw serious moral scrutiny, the scene earned the film an objectionable in part for all rating from the Legion of Decency, the Catholic organization that judged the the of movies, and could dramatically shape how a picture landed with audiences. Cheap it was not. That single festival sequence reportedly cost around $100,000 to stage. The moment fans giggle at today is campy and over the top played. In 1959, as a genuinely provocative, expensive, carefully rehearsed set piece that pressed right up against the edge of what audiences of the era were allowed to see. It existed to be talked about and it worked.

[00:25:21]Fact number [music] 18. Look closely.

[00:25:24]Solomon has hair and the shields are wrong. Two visual details reward a careful rewatch here. First, Yul Brynner, one of the most famously bald men in the history of cinema, appears in Solomon and Sheba with a full head of hair. That sight ranks as strikingly rare across his filmography. One of the few times you catch Brynner playing a role with hair. Something he also pulled off in the film The Sound and the Fury.

[00:25:46]For an actor whose smooth scalp practically served as his trademark.

[00:25:50]Seeing it feels small but startling. And once you notice it, you cannot look away. Second, and history buffs adore this one. The Star of David [music] turns up throughout the movie stitched onto shields and clothing. That symbol is an anachronism. The Star of David did not become a recognized Jewish emblem until many centuries after the era of the historical King Solomon. Which means the production dressed its ancient Israelites in an image that would not have existed in their lifetimes. Once you learn to look for it, you spot that six-pointed star everywhere. A little window into how Hollywood of this period built its picture of the ancient world out of familiar, comforting imagery rather than strict accuracy. That is the kind of detail separating the casual viewer from the true fan. Honestly, it forms part of the charm. These grand 1950s biblical epics never really functioned as documentaries. They worked as spectacles designed to move an audience with sweep and grandeur and instantly recognizable symbols. And Solomon and Sheba stands as a textbook example of that whole tradition. A movie far more interested in looking magnificent than in nailing every historical footnote. Accept it on those terms and the anachronisms stop reading as mistakes and start reading as fingerprints of an entire lost style of movie making. Fact number 19. The battle is won with a mirror trick. For all the criticism this film has absorbed over the decades, one sequence wins praise even from its harshest detractors and it counts as a genuinely clever piece of staging. In the climactic battle, the Egyptians badly outnumber Solomon's army. The solution comes from the sun.

[00:27:22]Solomon's forces line up facing east >> [music] >> and raise their highly polished shields, angling them to bounce the light of the rising sun straight into the eyes of the charging Egyptian army. Blinded by the glare, the Egyptians lose all sense of where they are going and charge right over the edge of a cliff to their destruction. It is an inventive, striking solution and it is exactly the kind of large-scale spectacle that all those Spanish horses and all those Spanish army cavalrymen came in to make possible. King Vidor's staging of this shield and sunlight sequence stands by wide agreement as the single most impressive moment in the entire film. In a movie so defined by chaos behind the scenes, it works as proof that a master director still held the wheel, still capable of delivering a memorable piece of cinema even while the production burned around him. Fact number 20. It was a hit, a worst film and its director's greatest regret. Now, the final verdict and the story of how audiences and critics received this movie brims with contradictions. The film held its world premiere in London on October 27th, 1959 at the Astoria Theatre on Charing Cross Road, presented in that dazzling 70 mm format. It then opened across the United States on Christmas Day, December 25th of that year with its New York premiere at the Capitol Theatre. Editor Andrew Ludwig cut and assembled the whole thing, handed the unenviable [music] task of stitching one coherent film together out of two versions of the same production.

[00:28:45]The reviews on release ran from indifferent to openly hostile. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times went after the screenplay, treating it as a fabricated Hollywood fable with little connection to any real biblical or historical truth. Years later, in 1978, the film locked in its infamy when it landed at number 38 in the book The 50 Worst Films of All Time. One contemporary notice from the magazine Q cut deep enough to stay quoted ever since, [music] declaring that the film may well owe a debt to society for its cosmic breaches of taste, morality, and intelligence, and that penance is due.

[00:29:19]Even Yul Brynner's own son, Rock Brynner, turned brutal about it in later years, writing that the movie sat on an aesthetic par with a cheap Mussulman picture, and that George Sanders, then in his 50s, looked so feeble in battle that he turned to camera as if soliciting comfort from the audience.

[00:29:35]And yet audiences showed up anyway. Not every review turned hostile, either. The trade paper Variety praised the film's magnificent production scenes and judged that Brynner did fine work as a Solomon who came across in the end as a man of ordinary flesh and blood unable to resist Sheba. Commercially, the picture scored a genuine hit, pulling in around five and a half million dollars in North American rentals against a total worldwide gross of roughly 12.2 million dollars. A movie branded one of the 50 worst ever made, in other words, thrived at the box office. It even earned an Academy Award nomination for its art direction, recognition for the work of Richard Day, Alfred Sweeney, and Louis Perez Espinosa, whose lavish sets handed the film a scale that critics grudgingly admired even as they savaged everything else. The story itself proved stubbornly durable. Hollywood had reached for it before in an earlier lost silent spectacle, a 1921 version of the Queen of Sheba that had starred Betty Blythe, and it would reach for it again after. A remake arrived decades later in 1995, directed by Robert M. Young under the Dino De Laurentiis banner for Showtime with Halle Berry as the Queen of Sheba and Yul Brynner as Solomon. Vidor believed the tragedy had gutted his film.

[00:30:47]With Tyrone Power he insisted it would have turned out a marvelous picture, while with Yul Brynner, who struck him as too cautious and inhibited stepping into the part under such grim circumstances, it curdled into what Vidor called an unimportant indifferent sort of picture. Power, by Vidor's account, had understood the anguished dual nature of the king, [music] a man torn in two, and had told him more than once during filming that this was the best part he had ever played and the best picture he had ever joined.

[00:31:13]Brynner, in Vidor's telling, fought the idea of a troubled monarch and wanted instead to dominate every situation without conflict, an attitude that damaged the very integrity of the film.

[00:31:23]The last theatrical movie of a five-time Oscar nominee became in his own mind a lesser shadow of what it might have been. As for tracking it down today, the film has never received a full high-end restoration. It reached DVD in 2008 and later arrived on Blu-ray, including a limited collector's edition of 3,000 copies, before Sandpiper Pictures reissued it on Blu-ray again in 2022. It even won a measure of critical rehabilitation when the Berlin International Film Festival screened it in 2020 as part of a retrospective honoring King Vidor using a digitally improved print curated by the German film archive, the Deutsche Kinemathek.

[00:32:00]>> [music] >> Slowly the reputation is turning away from one of the worst films ever made and toward a flawed, fascinating, visually rich survivor with one of the strangest backstories in Hollywood. The film still surfaces on various streaming platforms from time to time, though exactly where you can watch it tends to shift from year to year, so that part is always worth checking for yourself.

[00:32:20]There you have it, 20 hidden facts about Solomon and Sheba. What began as a grand showcase for Tyrone Power, a project years in the making, transformed through one sudden heart attack on a windswept Spanish set into one of the most extraordinary rescue stories in Hollywood history, a nearly finished epic with a dead star at its center, saved by insurance money, re-shot across 10 frantic weeks around a replacement who had once turned the role down, stripped of its original leading man by a single clause in a contract, and finally released to lukewarm reviews, strong ticket sales, and a lifetime of regret from the legendary director who made it. This is a film where the drama behind the camera will always outshine the drama on screen. A movie about a wise king that doubles as a monument to how fast everything can change. Consider everything it took just to reach the finish line. A producer who had chased the idea since 1953, a leading lady who staked her own money on it, a punishing shoot in the Spanish cold, a star who died with the film three-quarters shot, an insurance company that demanded he be erased, a friend who surrendered Spartacus to take his place, and a director who never forgave what all of it did to his final picture. That any watchable movie exists at all counts, in its own [music] way, as a small miracle.

[00:33:33]Next time you watch Solomon and Sheba, remember this. You are not simply watching Yul Brynner play a king. What you are really watching is the ghost of the movie it was meant to be, the shadow of a Tyrone Power epic the world never got to see. If you rode with us all the way to the end, you are exactly the kind of classic film lover we make these videos for. So, tell us in the comments which of these 20 facts you never knew, and we will see you in the next one.