Reviewed by bkoganbing 5 / 10 Labors Under A Handicap Of No MessengerĪpparently when Mohammed founded Islam he never factored in the great use that motion pictures could be made for spreading the faith. The Message is about the early days of Islam, but as a film it labors under the insurmountable handicap of us not seeing the messenger.īy all accounts the messenger was one charismatic fellow. He would have to have been to have accomplished what he did. He was not only a great religious teacher, but apparently quite the military strategist. It was by arms as well as faith that Islam triumphed in the Arabian peninsula and was spreading elsewhere when the Prophet died in 632. What we have in The Message is a cast playing to a vacuum.
Anthony Quinn, Irene Papas, Michael Ansara and the rest of the players talk to the camera as if Mohammed was like Philip Marlowe in Lady of the Lake, that famous noir film shot in the first person. We never hear Mohammed, we see him on two occasions in long-shot and he's not recognizable. Still even laboring under that handicap, when it opened in 1976 there were still protests.
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