King of Kings (Samuel Bronston; M-G-M). Christianity, which has survived the Turkish onslaught and the Communist conspiracy, may even survive this picture; but individual Christians who try to sit through it may find themselves longing for extreme unction.
A remake of Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 life of Christ. King of Kings was produced in Spain by a marked-down DeMille named Samuel Bronston who built 396 sets, hired some 20,000 extras and a dozen slightly famous players, spent more than four months and $8,000.000. And what emerged? Incontestably the corniest, phoniest, ickiest and most monstrously vulgar of all the big Bible stories Hollywood has told in the last decade. Nevertheless, the subject is so dear to the hearts of millions that King of Kings will undoubtedly be filling Hollywood's collection plates for months to come. Scheduled for reserved-seat. pre-Christmas release at fancy prices ($1.50-$3.50 on Broadway), the film will soon be playing in 26 cities from Los Angeles to Rome, has rung up an advance sale of about $600,000—bigger than Ben Hur's.
Fortunately. Bronston's bust enjoys one solid virtue: a script precisely organized and competently prosed by Playwright Philip (Anna Lucasta) Yordan. who has often quite sensitively reconciled the grandeurs of the King James version with the need for a fresh, contemporary tone. After noisily establishing the Romans in Palestine. Scenarist Yordan moves swiftly and synoptically through the Gospels: The Nativity, The Flight into Egypt. The Massacre of the Innocents; Christ's boyhood, baptism and temptation in the desert; Salome's Dance and the murder of John the Baptist; the Sermon on the Mount, the triumphal procession to Jerusalem, the Last Supper, the Agony in the Garden, the Trial before Pilate, the Ascent of Calvary, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection. Unfortunately, many of these episodes are shamelessly scanted and most of Christ's miracles—certainly the most dramatic moments of his ministry—are inexplicably omitted. The time thus saved is devoted to two bombinating battles that never actually took place; to a wildly unhistorical subplot that exaggerates Barabbas (vaguely identified by the Bible as an insurrectionist) into a sort of George Washington of the Jews, and makes Judas merely a bewildered Benedict Arnold; to a number of incidents in the life of Christ —among them a dramatic death-cell confrontation with John the Baptist—that are nowhere sanctioned by scripture and invariably ring false.
Director Nicholas Ray makes few positive contributions. With his customary penchant for the pretentious (Johnny Guitar), he slushes up the sound track with angel voices—all, as usual, soprano, apparently on the theory that only girls are nice enough to be angels: he fancy-pants around with his camera in a ludicrous gilt-plaster palace that looks as if it were made of baroque-candy; and he ever-so-reverently overdresses his hovel scenes till they gloom and glow like cheap reproductions of Murillo.