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With his actors Director Ray does no better, Frank Thring plays Herod Antipas in the grand, grotesque manner of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, but since nobody else is playing at the same pitch he just looks like some kind of a nut. Robert Ryan reads the part of John the Baptist with a clear Midwestern twang, and a degree of woodenness that may incline the spectator to sympathize with Salome when she calls for his head on a platter. As Salome, 16-year-old Brigid Bazlen is pretty enough, but as a belly dancer she has too little ootch in her cootch. And as the Mother of God, Siobhan McKenna does little more than smirk and mince as though she were playing Mother Machree. The imitation of Christ is little better than blasphemy.* Granted that the role is impossible to cast or play; granted that the attempt may nevertheless be worth making. Whatever possessed Producer Bronston to offer the part to Jeffrey Hunter, 35, a fan-mag cover boy with a flabby face, a cute little lopsided smile, babyblue eyes and barely enough histrionic ability to play a Hollywood marine? And why dress the poor guy up in a glossy-curly pageboy peruke, why shave his armpits and powder his face till he looks like the pallid, simpering chorus-boy Christ of the religious-supply shoppes?
The definitive criticism of Bronston's Christ, and indeed of his entire film, is expressed in the snide subtitle by which it is widely known in the trade: I Was a Teenage Jesus.
The Devil at Four O'Clock (Columbia) is a somewhat less ambitious attempt to invoke the blessings of heaven on the pursuit of the buck. Made mostly in Hawaii by Producer Fred Kohlmar and Director Mervyn Leroy, Devil lists only two big-name players (Frank Sinatra and Spencer Tracy), but the moviemakers managed to spend $5,000,000—in Hollywood it takes more than faith to (literally) remove a mountain.
Tracy is a hardhanded Irish-American priest whose parish is a small French-owned island in the South Pacific. Sinatra is a hard-nosed Italo-American convict assigned, along with two other old lags, to work in the priest's leper colony for children, a small compound situated on the slopes of an extinct volcano and occupied by 28 of the cutest little lepers. Well, one day while Sinatra and Tracy are down by the sea, the volcano erupts and the French governor orders the evacuation of the island. But what about the children? Tracy heads back for the hills to rescue them, and Sinatra & Co., promised a parole, decide to give the padre a helping hand.
They do, and for the next hour they fight their way through forests of shiny plastic plants, rivers of pretty pink lava made of wheat germ and water, pools of nasty grey quicksand, flocks of brilliantly plumaged clichés. In the end, of course, the children are saved, and the entire island—a made-in-California mudpie 200 ft. long. 45 ft. high, painted green and filled with explosives—gives a funny little twitch and: BLOOEY! But never mind. Sinatra has crossed himself just in time, so presumably he goes to heaven, where hopefully he will not be permitted to make any more lousy movies.