The Prodigal is a 1955

1955 in film

The year 1955 in film involved some significant events.-Events:* November 3 - The musical Guys and Dolls, starring Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra, debuts.* June 27 - The last ever Republic serial, King of the Carnival, is released....

 Biblical epic film made by MGM. It was directed by Richard Thorpe

Richard Thorpe

Richard Thorpe was an American film director.Born Rollo Smolt Thorpe in Hutchinson, Kansas, he began his entertainment career performing in vaudeville and onstage. In 1921 he began in motion pictures as an actor and directed his first silent film in 1923. He went on to direct more than one hundred...

 and produced by Charles Schnee

Charles Schnee

Charles Schnee gave up law to become a screenwriter in the mid-1940s, crafting scripts for the classic Westerns Red River and The Furies , the social melodrama They Live By Night , and the cynical Hollywood saga The Bad and the Beautiful , for which he won an Academy...

.

The Maurice Zimm

Maurice Zimm

Maurice Zimm was an American radio, television and film writer whose most famous creation was the Creature from the Black Lagoon...

 screenplay was adapted by Joseph Breen, Jr. and Samuel James Larsen from the New Testament

New Testament

The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....

 story of the selfish son who leaves his family in search of riches. The music score was by Bronislau Kaper, and the cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg

Joseph Ruttenberg

Joseph Ruttenberg, A.S.C. was a photojournalist and cinematographer.Ruttenberg was accomplished winning accolades. At MGM, Ruttenberg was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography ten times, winning four. In addition, he won the 1954 Golden Globe Award for his camera work on the...

.

The film stars Lana Turner

Lana Turner

Lana Turner was an American actress.Discovered and signed to a film contract by MGM at the age of sixteen, Turner first attracted attention in They Won't Forget . She played featured roles, often as the ingenue, in such films as Love Finds Andy Hardy...

, Edmund Purdom

Edmund Purdom

Edmund Anthony Cutlar Purdom was a British actor.-Early life:Purdom was born in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, England and educated at St. Augustine's Abbey School, Ramsgate, then by the Jesuits at St. Ignatius Grammar School and Welwyn Garden City Grammar School...

, Louis Calhern

Louis Calhern

Louis Calhern was an American stage and screen actor.- Early life :Louis Calhern was born Carl Henry Vogt on February 19, 1895 in Brooklyn, New York. His family left New York City while he was still a child and moved to St. Louis, Missouri where he grew up...

, James Mitchell

James Mitchell (actor)

James Mitchell was an American actor and dancer. Although he is best known to television audiences as Palmer Cortlandt on the soap opera All My Children , theatre and dance historians remember him as one of Agnes de Mille's leading dancers...

, Joseph Wiseman

Joseph Wiseman

Joseph Wiseman was a Canadian theater and film actor, best known for starring as the titular antagonist of the first James Bond film, Dr. No, his role as Manny Weisbord on Crime Story, and his career on Broadway...

, Cecil Kellaway

Cecil Kellaway

Cecil Lauriston Kellaway was a South African-born character actor.Cecil Kellaway spent many years as an actor, author, and director in the Australian film industry until he tried his luck in Hollywood in the 1930s. Finding he could get only gangster bit parts, he got discouraged and returned to...

 and Walter Hampden

Walter Hampden

Walter Hampden is the artist name of Walter Hampden Dougherty was a U.S. actor and theatre manager. He was the younger brother of the American painter Paul Dougherty ....

. The dancer Taina Elg

Taina Elg

Taina Elg is a Finnish-American actress and dancer. She has appeared on stage, film and television.-Biography:She was born in Helsinki, but later raised in Turku by her parents, Helena Dobroumova and Åke Elg, a pianist. In 1957 she won the Golden Globe for the Foreign Newcomer Award - Female...

 made her film debut.

The Prodigal was satirized in Mad

Mad (magazine)

Mad is an American humor magazine founded by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines in 1952. Launched as a comic book before it became a magazine, it was widely imitated and influential, impacting not only satirical media but the entire cultural landscape of the 20th century.The last...

#26 (November 1955) as "The Prodigious".