When Cecil B. DeMille undertook to portray Jesus in his 1927 film King of Kings, he established a style of reverential spectacle that endured for decades in such religious pageants as Ben-Hur, The Robe, the remake of King of Kings, and The Greatest Story Ever Told. In recent years the interpretations have become broader. Jesus was a fierce champion of the oppressed in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, a crucified clown in Godspell, a befuddled mystic in Jesus Christ Superstar, a well-intentioned charlatan in The Passover Plot. A Danish producer is even trying to turn out a pornographic flick about the Galilean.
Next week the classical Christ-on-celluloid comes back full force in Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, created not for the movies but for television. For sheer spectacle and expense ($18 million), nothing like it, religious or otherwise, has ever been attempted on TV. The two-part film will fill three hours of prime time on NBC on both Palm Sunday and Easter,* and it is well worth viewing. Director Zeffirelli, an Italian and a Roman Catholic, has brought to the project a rare combination of religious sensitivity and film expertise (Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew). Novelist Anthony Burgess has written an intelligent script, and the notable cast includes Anne Bancroft (Mary Magdalene), James Earl Jones (Balthasar), Stacy Keach (Barabbas), James Mason (Joseph of Arimathaea), Laurence Olivier (Nicodemus), Christopher Plummer (Herod Antipas), Ralph Richardson (Simeon), Rod Steiger (Pontius Pilate) and Peter Ustinov (Herod the Great).
Under Fire. To make sure the film was as accurate as possible, Producer Lord Grade consulted experts from the Vatican to the Leo Baeck Rabbinical College of London and the Koranic School at Meknes, Morocco. But the film nonetheless came under ideological fire from Protestant right-wingers, led by Bob Jones III, president of South Carolina's Bob Jones University. Zeffirelli had told an interviewer from Modern Screen that he would portray Jesus as "an ordinary man—gentle, fragile, simple," and Jones leaped to the conclusion that the portrayal would deny Christ's divine nature. Without seeing the film, he denounced it as "blasphemy." Others picked up the cry, and soon 18,000 angry letters descended on General Motors, which had put up $3 million toward the cost of the film. The auto company backed out of sponsorship, sacrificing its investment. Said Lord Grade dryly: "General Motors found the program so sensitive and beautiful that they think it would be wrong for a commercial company to take advantage of it."