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Old 01-31-2017, 05:52 PM   #26 (permalink)
Trollheart
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Originally posted December 21 2013



While nobody would ever accuse me of being the most religious person, I do like the story of Jesus and love to see movies about it. Christian fundamentalists would have us all believe that God created everything, and that may be true. If so, then he also created movies. But in another strange, kind of roundabout way, movies could be said to have created God, at least for the big or small screen. As far back as 1905 they were making silent movies about Our Lord, and of course with the advent of colour, 70mm film and things like Cinemascope and Technicolour, it was only natural that the sixties would see some of the biggest, baddest and most over-the-top movies about Jesus ever made.

That’s what this section is all about then: deciding which is the better. I had originally intended this to be a three-way fight, but the third contestant, 1953’s “The Robe”, turns out not to be about Jesus at all. He’s in it, but only peripherally, and really it would be unfair to put such a movie up against the other two, so we’re down to a proper head-to-head, a real slamdown and a fight for the title of the Classic Christ Movie.

In the blue corner, weighing in at 260 minutes and with a budget of approximately 21 million US Dollars, we have

Originally a four-hour-plus epic, drastically cut back in later releases and eventually shortened to 2 hours 17 minutes, “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (you’ve got to capitalise the lot, don’t you really?) was based on a novel by Fulton Ouster, itself based on a radio play that ran in the US in 1947 episodically. George Stevens was the man who intended to bring it to the big screen, but it was a slow process. The screenplay took over two years to write alone, and by 1961, four years before its release date, costs had already spiralled to a staggering 2.3 million US Dollars, which even back then was a boatload of money, considering not one scene had yet been shot! So concerned were they with the rising costs involved in making the movie --- or more correctly, preparing to make it --- that backers Twentieth Century Fox dropped the project, and Stevens had to be saved by United Artists, who eventually released the picture.

Like most of the movies about the life of Jesus, this sticks fairly closely to the “facts”, as they were, which is to say, the version described in the Bible. It’s almost a direct telling of the story from that revered tome, and doesn’t deviate much if at all from the accepted version. Interestingly though, it was a general unknown who was offered the top role, indeed the very man who played Antonius Block, the knight in recently-reviewed Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Max von Sydow, and for my money he did a good job. Apparently Stevens wanted someone not already linked with any role or character, someone US audiences would not know. I must say though, Charlton Heston in the role of John the Baptist comes close to stealing the show, and that’s not an easy thing to do when you’re up against the Son of God!

The version I watched clocked in at just under three hours and twenty minutes, and even at that reduced time from the original it seemed long, slow and boring in many places. Definitely a case of being overstretched. I shudder to think what the full version was like! The film also suffers from a “me too!” syndrome, with film stars all wanting a bit part, some of which make no sense. The most famous and well-known of these is of course the sudden appearance out of nowhere by John Wayne, who drawls “Truly this man was the son of God!” in his characteristic, laconic and almost bored manner, but Martin Landau fails to shine as Caiphas, Roddy McDowell as Matthew is almost anonymous and David McCallum is completely wasted in the role of Judas, a one-dimensional, flat and uninspiring character compared to the one played in the other movie. Others of note include Pat Boone, Shelley Winters, Angela Lansbury and Sidney Poitier, though what any of them are doing in the movie is anyone’s guess. Even Star Trek’s Sarek, the late Mark Lenard, gets a look in!

The music is of course stunning and evocative, as you would expect, and Alfred Newman’s score was one of five Academy Awards the film was nominated for. Whether it won any of them I don’t know. The sets are also very impressive, though I do wonder about Stevens’ insistence on shooting the whole thing in America? Sounds a little like trying to prove God was born in Queens to me! Mind you, our other movie didn’t head to the Holy Land either, but with a budget of twenty-one mill you would have thought they would have, literally, gone the extra mile. Or few thousand miles, I guess. Nonetheless, I have to admit that when they show the scene ostensibly taking place in the desert where Jesus faces forty days and nights of temptation and fasting, I would never have guessed it was Death Valley, and similarly, the sermon on the Mount actually takes place in Utah, so it’s not like it’s obvious, but still, you do feel a little bit cheated that they’re not actually walking in the footsteps of Jesus Christ. Unless he ever visited California, which I find unlikely….

All quibbles aside though, and remembering that the movie never grossed even its freakishly huge budget, and so was seen as a flop and an expensive failure, I did enjoy The Greatest Story Ever Told, with certain reservations, which I will detail later on in this article when I compare the two movies and put them up against each other. But what about its classic opponent?

Well, in the red corner, ladies and gentlemen, will you please give it up for



Not to be confused with the earlier movie of almost the same name from the twenties, which just added the definite article to its title, this was the other “blockbuster bible movie” of the day, and the two are in many ways very similar, and in other ways poles apart. Interestingly, while George Stevens was flying to Rome to consult the Pope on the making of his movie, this one slipped in under the radar and got released four years before his made the big screen, which must have been annoying for the great filmmaker, as this would have been the first “real” movie about Christ since 1935’s Golgotha, unless you count Ben Hur, which I don’t, or indeed The Robe, which I also don’t, as neither focus on the actual figure of Christ and he is basically incidental, although instrumental, to the storyline. But poor old Stevens: that’s what you get for farting around with 352 oil paintings as your storyboard and retaking every scene a zillion times: someone else beats you to it!

Starring Jeffrey “I could have been Kirk” Hunter in the top role, it’s something of a different take on the story, though again it sticks very closely to the writings of Scripture. King of Kings details the birth of Christ, the journey to Bethlehem and the exile to Egypt, whereas this is brushed over in The Greatest Story Ever Told, which is odd, considering the latter is the longer picture by about an hour and would have easily been able to accomodate such a surely integral and important part of the plot, as it were? But like its rival, King of Kings, mainly concentrates on Jesus’s life from age thirty or so, from the time he begins to preach, gathering his disciples to him and generally getting up the noses of the Romans. That’s not surprising, as really, up to that point there’s little in the Bible about Jesus the man, leading to speculation on what exactly he did for those twenty-odd years between childhood and manhood, but that’s another story. Any film or series focussing on Jesus will always be firmly set in this short period of his life.

There are, as I said, things I like about TGSET that I don’t like about KOK, and vice versa of course. One of the former is the way Jesus’s miracles are handled. In this film, we see things like Jesus approaching a blind man who bumps into him as just a shadow on a wall. He stretches out his shadowy hand and the man drops his stick, obviously (I guess) cured. A madman is not portrayed as very mad (did you see the guy in Jesus of Nazareth? THAT was scary!) and in general the miracles are not quite glossed over but definitely not given the sense of drama and power that TGSET lavishes on them. Contrast the scene outside Lazarus’s tomb in the other movie with the one here - oh no wait, don’t. King of Kings doesn’t feature that miracle. What? Jesus’s biggest feat, his crowning glory, his piece de resistance, when he proves even Death can’t hold sway over someone he calls forth, and they don’t show it?

Yeah. The movie suffers from a massive dearth of miracles, and those that are shown are treated in an almost offhand, matter-of-fact way. No angels singing, no shafts of sunlight bathing the Saviour’s face as he performs these wonders, no crowds gathering to watch in amazement and then spread the word that the Messiah has come. Very drab and humdrum. Maybe there was a reason, maybe director Nicholas Ray didn’t want to focus too much on the miracles aspect of the story, but come on! The guy raised the dead! He healed the blind and the lame! He cast out demons! You have to show those, and make them an important part of the story.

But where King of Kings fails in respect of its opponent - Miracles: Greatest Story Ever Told 1, King of Kings 0 - it walks all over it (I know: I was going to say something else but figured it wouldn’t be appropriate when dealing with these movies. Gotta have respect, even if you don’t believe!) on another score, and that is the portrayal of Judas Iscariot. From an early age, we Irish were brought up on the notion that Judas was evil. He betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, but we were never told why. We never asked. It was just accepted, the same as any religious dogma in Ireland at the time was. WHY had you to fast before receiving Holy Communion? Why could you not touch it if it got stuck to the roof of your mouth - as it always, without fail, did - and why were you supposed to (in my parents’ day, not mine) genuflect if you met a priest in the street? Nobody asked these questions: they weren’t even rhetorical, they just weren’t accepted as questions. They just were, okay? Accept it and stop asking stupid questions. In the very same way, Judas was a betrayer, a coward and a traitor and you should hate him.

It wasn’t till I watched Jesus Christ Superstar and Martin Scorsese’s excellent The Last Temptation of Christ that I got the idea that Judas was not just an evil figure, he was a person; a person with ideals and hopes and dreams, and that he betrayed Jesus for a reason. This made more sense, and indeed this is the tack that King of Kings takes. Judas is a revolutionary when we meet him, fighting alongside Barabbas, his leader, and he believes he can turn Jesus to their cause, convince him to fight for Judea and call down hosts of angels, or at the worst, lead his hosts of followers against the Roman oppressor. When he sees this will not happen of its own accord, that Jesus is dedicated to peace, Judas tries to force his hand, hoping that if he is arrested he will spring into action and defend himself, and become an ally of he and Barabbas, leading the Jews to glorious liberation.

At last, someone gets it. I’m no connoisseur of movies about Jesus, but I think I’m safe in saying that King of Kings was the first of this genre to look sympathetically at Judas. Tim Rice would do so ten years later, and others would too: even in Jesus of Nazareth I seem to recall him being a more rounded, less cartoon-villain figure, but this was the first time I think anyone had voiced the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Judas had a reason, excuse or agenda in betraying his master. Played by Rip Torn, he’s certainly a better character here than in George Stevens’ somewhat pompous oversimplification of the man. In TGSET Barabbas is only mentioned at the end, when he gets his freedom at the expense of Christ’s, and he has no other role at all to play in that movie. Here, he is a pivotal if not central figure, laughing at then briefly sharing Judas’s hope that they might ally with the Messiah, finally using his speech at the temple to launch an abortive attack on his enemy. When he realises later that Jesus is dying in his place (not that he has a choice of course, but the people have chosen Barabbas) he asks “Why? I never did anything for him.” He truly can’t understand it, though Lucius, the Roman general, scowls “Your people shouted loudest”, obviously at pains to make the rebel leader realise it is only simple good fortune that has secured his freedom, and his life.

Although much shorter than its later companion film, King of Kings gets pretty much the whole story in, which of course you would expect and demand, but also manages to presage it with the arrival of Pompey as he claims Jerusalem and sets up a garrison there, and adds in elements of the later Jewish struggle for independence and freedom, as well as alluding to the Roman governor, Pilate’s wife being somewhat sympathetic to Jesus, or at least his message. Again though, the two movies differ vastly when it comes to the crucifixion scene, with TGSET losing out as it watches much of the action from far off, down the hill at Golgotha. I’m not saying I wanted closeups of the nails going into Jesus’s hands or anything, but there’s a more personal, intimate feeling to the scene in this film, with the action all taking place in front of you; you see Christ nailed to the cross (tastefully done) and raised up, you see people moving about below him as he hangs there, you see the two thieves talk to him (although in fairness you see this in the other movie too, but I think this one just about edges it in terms of drama) and best of all, there’s no John Wayne!

Resurrection, I’d say there’s very little between the two movies, though this one does just end with the shadow of Christ falling across the apostles, who then sort of wander aimlessly offscreen in the final scene; where it actually shows Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene outside the tomb in this movie, in TGSET she just meets the angel inside the tomb once Jesus has risen, so again I think this one is slightly more personal. Not to mention that in the closing scene of this we see the smiling, radiant face of Jesus while in the other movie he’s just a shadow and a voice. Interestingly, the very same end hymn is used, though it seems to be quite appropriate and was probably the only one that could have been used.

So, both movies represent the story of Christ’s birth, life and death reasonably well, and certainly better than some have down the years. But each has its own flaws, and while in one category TGSET triumphs, in others it’s KOK that lands the killer punch. So, which movie is better? How can we even choose between two such classics? We probably in reality can’t, but for the purposes of this article we have to: to quote Highlander - there can be only one. So how do we do that? Well, let’s list off the main points and compare like for like, and see how we do. For each scene, aspect or fact considered I’ll award a score out of ten, explaining along the way how I arrived at that score. Then we’ll total them up and see who comes out on top, or if this ends up being a dead heat. Even I don’t know at this point. Oooh! Exciting, isn’t it?

What do you mean, no? Fuc - er, peace be with you, my son...
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Last edited by Trollheart; 03-07-2017 at 03:27 PM.
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