The distinctive quality of the book is cinematic it contains an almost exhaustive repertoire of film devices (fade-out, close-up, montage) rendered in prose terms. When this book was conceived four or five years ago, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contracted for the movie rights and financed the author’s trip to Europe and Israel “to research the story.” Thus, Exodus is not really a novel at all, but a sketch for a scenario with a few prose accretions-some simplified and sentimentalized Jewish history, large doses of Zionist publicity pamphlets ground down to fine pap, etc., etc.
Uris previously converted his best-selling Battle Cry into a film, and wrote the screenplay for Gunfight at the O.K. Like many bestsellers, Exodus (a quarter-of-a-million copies sold to date 30-odd weeks on the best-seller list current sale 8,000 copies a week) was written with one eye on the movies.
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