Films about Jesus--How to Succeed
by John Aquino on 04/14/14
As the feast of Easter draws near, it's interesting to reflect on the films based on the life of Jesus Christ. It's a story of expansion of the texts, curses, a few major failures, but more successful films than many people realize.
Considering that the story of Jesus in talked about in Christian church services every Sunday and for some every day across the world, it's interesting that there are relatively few films about his life. On the one hand, there is a built-in interest for the story for many people. On the other hand, from a filmmakers' perspective, it's a story that took place 2,000 years ago, and the language and period are difficult to address--the language especially may seem "biblical" in the sense of pretentious and archaic. It is a subject where the audience' devotion to the story puts incredble pressure on the filmmaker to get it right, and, box office performance for stories of the life of Christ have reportedly been poor, although that appears to be a myth.
Early Films and King of Kings. Films about the life of Christ were first made in the late 19th century, following a centuries-old tradition of passion plays such as the Passion Play at Oberammergau, in the German town of that name, which Thomas Edison's company filmed in 1898. Like many of the silent films made about Christ, the 1898 film no longer exists. D.W. Griffith included the story of Jesus' trial and death as one of the four interlocking stories about intolerance in the 1916 film Intolerance. (The British actor Howard Gaye who played Christ became involved in a sex scandal. He was sent back to England, and his name was removed from the credits.)
In 1927, another major director, Cecil B. DeMille, who like Griffith had previously used both a story from the Bible, Moses, that he intercut with a modern story in the 1923 film The Ten Commandments, took on the story of Jesus in his 1927 film The King of Kings. While DeMille discarded his original plan to incorporate the story of Jesus with a modern story, he began the film, not with the Nativity story or a scene from Jesus' life but with an orgy scene featuring Mary Magdelene, who is portrayed as a courtesan, and Judas. Some characterized DeMille's technique as sex and religion epics.
And yet, once he established a scene to lure in viewers who might be lukewarm to religious films, DeMille did some striking things. We first see Jesus through the eyes of a young boy as he regains his sight as a result of Jesus' miracle. DeMille also established a pattern for later makers of films about Jesus--or about anyone's life, for that matter--of having to go beyond the source material to explore a character's motivation and how this particular scene relates to the whole. In John 8.7, which has the story of how Jesus stopped a crowd from stoning a woman accused with adultery, John the Evangelist describes how Jesus sat on the ground and wrote on the earth. Since he deals in images, DeMille has to show what Jesus wrote and why. And so we see that Jesus looks up at a man and writes, "Murderer," whereupon the man drops his stone and moves away. Jesus writes, going from man to man, dropped stone to dropped stone, until all the men have moved away. The conclusion is that he who is without sin should throw the first stone. The Gospel of John doesn't tell us what Jesus wrote, but DeMille presents a reasonable explanation.
DeMille also encountered what was then the unique problem of having to show Jesus being crucified. The crew didn't think about it at first but when they were filming the scene realized that the real cause of death in crucifixtions was usually asphyiation and that if left on the cross while the crew fiddled with the lights or while the other actors muffed their lines H.B. Warner, who played Jesus, could actually die. Someone came up with the idea of nailing a bicycle seat to the cross so that if Warner experienced problems breathing he could just sit down. Otherwise, his body hid the seat from the camera.
DeMille learned from Griffith's problem with Gaye and required that Warner and other actors playing holy men and women sign a contract that they wouldn't drink or smoke in public or behave in a scandal-causing way.
The script was credited to Jeanne Macpherson, who worked on DeMille films from the early 1920s until her death in 1946. She was also DeMille's mistress. Agnes DeMille, the famous choreographer and Decil B. DeMille's niece, said later that Macpherson had wonderful visual ideas but that Agnes DeMille actually wrote the screenplays after conferring with Macpherson. Be that as it may, in the late 1930s, Macpherson went to Italy to make films with Benito Mussolini's son, returning when war broke out.
King of Kings was an incredibly successful film, earning millions for DeMille Productions. A shortened version was made available for years at little or no expense to church and community groups. King of Kings was reportedly so successful that filmmakers thought no one could top it and so no one made another U.S. feature length film about Jesus for 34 years, and that one was also titled King of Kings.
What also may have chilled the idea of a retelling of the story of Jesus with sound was the problem of language. The King James Version of the Bible was written in 1611, and, while there were attempts to modernize it, much of it still stuck in the modernizations, with "shalt" and "lest" and "liveth." This is the language people grew up with in church. How to replace it?
A New King of Kings. Between the two King of Kings, the story of Jesus was used as a backdrop for such major films as M-G-M's Quo Vadis (1951), 20th Century Fox's The Robe (1953), and M-G-M's Ben Hur (1959). Since these films were not based on Bible texts, major writers such as S.N. Behrman, Christopher Fry, and Gore Vidal, showed that it was possible to have people in Jesus' time speak naturally. And these films were likely inspired by DeMille's successful return to the biblical epic in his 1949 film Samson and Deliah.
The success of Ben Hur led M-G-M to attempt a movie telling the story of Jesus, but from a new perspective. Nicholas Ray was the director. He was an offbeat choice in that he had previously tackled the cult teenage hoodlum drama Rebel without a Cause (1955) starring James Dean and other contemporary dramas. His approach was, not surprisingly, to give his retelling of Jesus' story a new even contemporary perspective. The producer was Samuel Bronston.
The writer and director John Farrow, husband of the actress Maureen O'Sullivan, father of the actress Mia Farrow, and a devout Catholic, had worked with Bronston on the 1959 film John Paul Jones and was to direct. He became obsessed with writing the screenplay for King of Kings but, to address the problem of language that the previous King of Kings did not have to deal with, insisted that every word in the script would be from the gospels.
Before he died in 2003, the screenwriter Philip Yordan, in an interview for the cable movie channel Turner Classics Movies, said that Bronston had asked him to read the script and Yordan told him that there was no script, that it was just a collection of lines from the Bible. Yordan took over the script, accepting the only money Bronston could give him--his children's tuition for a Swiss school, and Farrow was let go, never writing or directing a film again.
Yordan and Ray's prologue shows what a divergent approach they had from what Farrow and even DeMille had done. The prologue was written by the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury and spoken by Orson Welles. It shows the Roman counsel Pompey entering Rome in 65 B.C., ordering the death of of the Jewish priests who try to stop him from entering the temple. Entering the holy place by stepping over the priests' bodies, anxious to find the temple's "treasure," he discovers only scrolls containing the holy scriptures. He takes the scrolls, leaves the temple, and is approached by a priest who has survived the massacre and who begs him on his knees for the holy scrolls. Pompey clearly contemplates tossing the scrolls into a nearby fire but, looking down at the old man, on a whim, hands them to him, and so the holy scriptures survive. There's no record that I know of of Pompey sparing the scrolls that became the Bible, but it's a reasonable conjecture of something that could have happened.
And this is Yordan and Ray's approach throughout. Bararbas is not thief but a revolutionary opposing the Roman occupation. A young soldier who spares the baby Jesus during the slaughter of the hold innocents is later seen as the centurion at the cross who says that Jesus was truly the son of God, He becomes a choric figure throughout the film.
Jesus is young and vibrant as played by Jeffrey Hunter. He appeared to be so young that the film was cruelly dubbed "I Was a Teenage Jesus," playing off the 1957 horror film I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Hunter was actually 35 when he made the film, and Jesus was 33 when he died. The contrast may really have been between Hunter and Warner, who was 52 when he made the 1927 King of Kings.
The film had over $25 million in worldwide grosses against a $5 million estimated budget, so it was a financial success, although it was generally not successful in the long run for the participants. Yordan found his forte in writing spectacles, going on to pen El Cid, 55 Days at Peking, and The Fall of the Roman Empire for Bronston. The failure of the last one in 1964 bankrupted Bronston. Yordan too experienced hard times when he was accused of having profited from the blacklist. A prolific writer himself, he was approached by writers who had been blacklisted for having been communists or allegedly supporting communism and agreed to serve as their front. He put his name on their screenplays and shared the money with them. These writers and others later called Yordan a bloodsucking profiteer, while Yordan protested that he had just been helping these writers out and deserved at least some of the money because his reputation could have been harmed by the failure of screenplays that he did not write. As for Ray, Bronston was pleased enough with his work to have him direct his next film, 55 Days at Peking. But Ray had a breakdown, the film was finished by others, and Ray didn't really direct much after that.
Curse of Playing Jesus. There is also the question of the curse of playing Jesus. H.B. Warner, while he was contractually prohibited from drinking in public, drank in private, struggling with the pressure of playing Jesus. He became an alcoholic and never had another starring role. He was in his 60s then, however, and he did have smaller roles in such classic films as You Can't Take It With You (1938), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), and Sunset Boulevard (1950).
Hunter may have been hurt by playing Jesus. How do you followup such a role? He had a few starring part immediately afterward but soon was doing villains in the tv series The Green Hornet in 1966. He was given the part of Captain Pike in the first pilot of Star Trek. When a second pilot was ordered, Hunter was either no longer available or turned it down, depending on the story. William Shatner took over the role, which he played for three seasons and in six moves. In 1968, Hunter played a straight man to Bob Hope in The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Farrell. He died in 1969 as a result of a stroke and a fall at the age of 43.
More Recent Films. There followed some films that also re-envisioned Jesus. Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to Matthew (1964) portrayed him as a Marxist, Martin Scorcese's The Last Temptation of Christ was not based on the gospels but on a novel by Nikos Karantazakis, and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2005) told the story of Jesus with graphic depictions of the violence he endured to his body, in a script taken from the gospels but in Arameic with subtitles, the language that Jesus spoke--again addressing the problem of the language. The latter had a worldwide gross of $600 million against a budget of $30 million, showing that religious films do have a audience. It was also described as antisemitic in its strict citing of the gospel story's language.
There is, however, little dispute that the Passion of the Christ is straightforward, earnest, even gritty, and holds the interest. The use of subtitles indicates that it is an ancient story but the passion, if you will seems very real.
A more traditional, big budget approach can be seen in two films: George Stevens' The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth. Stevens' film was big-budget with a cast of major stars playing cameo roles--Shelley Winters as a leper who is cured, John Wayne as a centurion, Claude Rains as Herod--that some saw as a distraction. It was dignified, reverential, and somewhat long. Like Shane and other previous Stevens' films, it was low-key, with Jesus quietly talking to his followers. This seemed quite contemporary to a 1960's audience but also added to the slow pace. Stevens cast an actor to play Jesus who was perhaps unknown to many moviegoers but not to students of film--Max von Sydow, who has appeared in a number of films by the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. With his slightly foreign American accent and sense of gravitas, Sydow was highly praised. But the film was plagued with bad weather in its location shootings--in the U.S. and not in the Holy Land--and drew only $7 million in U.S. grosses against an estimated budget of $20 million. It was Stevens' next to last film.
Zeffirelli's film was made for television and ran six hours, which allowed it to tell the whole story of Jesus without excluding many of the stories from the gospels. It had a literate screenplay co-written by the novelist Anthony Burgess that, like Yordan's, re-envisioning of the story, took reasonable liberties with the story but always with respect. The star cameos were there but somehow didn't seem as intrusive as in Stevens' film.
As for the curse of playing Jesus, in the forty years after The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Enrique Irazoqui who played Jesus only made five more films. von Sydow and Robert Powell, who was Jesus in Jesus of Nazareth, developed careers as supporting actors but did not again obtain leading roles. Neither did the part of Jesus ignite the careers of William Dafoe in the Last Temptation of Christ or Jim Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ--Caviezel is starring in the U.S. tv series A Person of Interest.
It's interesting that no one appears to have become a major star as a result of playing Jesus. A number of major stars--Richard Burton, Tyrone Power--turned down the role.
Son of God. The most recent Jesus film, Son of God (2014), was expanded from the Jesus portion of a tv series called The Bible. It is very respectful, sincere, and moves at a good pace. But again, the problem is with the language. There are really no allusions to the wording of the gospel stories. There are four credited screenwriters and the approach appears to have been to adopt a modern way of speaking. Peter asks Jesus, "What are we going to do?, and Jesus answers, "We're going to change the world." When they find the tomb empty, John asks Peter, "So he is gone?", and Peter answers, "He's not gone. He's back!" Allusions to Arnold Schwarzenegger saying, "I'll be back" in the Terminator movies was probably unintentional--or maybe not.
The film cost an estimated $22 million to make and it took in $58 million in its first week in the U.S. alone, so it is likely to be financially successful. It's not a bad film and provides additional encouragement that the audience is there for such films.
Copyright 2014 by John T. Aquino
