It’s Easter Sunday and I’m about to begin a self-curated holiday film festival. I’m Jewish but I grew up with a deep fascination for the various cinematic versions of Jesus Christ. We’re in the midst of celebrating the Passover holiday. The first night of Passover fell on Good Friday this year and I’m still stuffed from the two Passover seders I’ve been to the past two nights but I’ve always liked it when Passover and Easter fall during the same time period. Unlike the arbitrary connections made between Hanukkah and Christmas to justify the gift-giving frenzy, there is definitely a shared history between these two springtime holidays. Passover and Easter are both important holidays of deliverance and they incorporate many of the same spring symbols such as eggs and lambs. We know that the crucifixion took place during Passover although there is scholarly debate about whether the Last Supper depicts an actual Passover seder or if the meal between Jesus and his disciples took place the day before the Passover holiday began.
As much as it would horrify my orthodox grandparents to know, Cecil B. DeMille shaped much of my understanding of Jewish history — I watch DeMille’s 1956 version of The Ten Commandments every Passover. But my cinematic Bible class also extends to the non-secular aspects of Easter.
The first film I remember seeing about the life and death of Jesus Christ was George Stevens’ modestly titled The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). My grandparents could rest easy because this four hour-plus film did little to make me want to convert. Swedish actor Max von Sydow played Jesus with such wooden seriousness that part of me couldn’t wait for Judas to turn him in to the authorities. The crucifixion scene was traumatic to watch but at least it signaled that the endless film was coming to a close.
A popular device in the 1960s was to drag out as many Big Stars as possible and give them tiny cameo roles in the year’s A-list films. The Greatest Story Ever Told dipped deep into the ranks of the Screen Actors Guild to populate its story. We are treated to a bombastic Telly Salavas as Pontius Pilate (apparently he first shaved his head for this role and like it so much he kept it that way through Kojak and the rest of his life), David Man from U.N.C.L.E. McCallum as Judas Iscariot, and Charlton Heston as John the Baptist, screaming “REPENT!” with all the gusto he used as Moses in The Ten Commandments.
The sick that Jesus miraculously healed through his Divine touch included the New York-accented Shelley Winters and Sal Mineo, along with a laughing Ed Wynn, sounding as if he’s still bobbing around the ceiling in the tea party with Jane and Michael Banks in Mary Poppins. We also had Dorothy McGuire as the Virgin Mary, Martin Landau as Caiaphas, and Claude Rains, in his last screen performance, as Herod. If you look closely you can also spot Angela Lansbury, Sidney Poitier, Jamie Farr, and Pat Boone wandering through the film as well as the Duke himself, John Wayne, as a Centurion supervising the crucifixion. Apparently Wayne’s one line, “Truly, this man was the Son of God” required endless takes — Stevens frantically tried and failed to get John Wayne to deliver the line in something other than his usual deadpan drawl. The locations of the film were frankly more suited to the Duke than they were to Jesus with most scenes shot in the American Southwest.
The next film I remember seeing about Jesus was Nicholas Ray’s popular King of Kings starring Jeffrey Hunter as the hunkiest blue-eyed Jesus to date (why does Hollywood insist on upholding the European tradition of depicting Middle Eastern Semitic Jesus as a blond-haired, blue-eyed male model?). This version of the story featured a well cast Rip Torn as Judas and Robert Ryan as John the Baptist (“Woman, is not your cup of abominations full enough?). One of our family friends is actress Barbara Rush who was Jeffrey Hunter’s first wife. Barbara likes to shock clergymen to this day by telling them with a straight face that her first husband was Jesus Christ and that she raised his son. Because of Hunter’s youthful appearance, the film became known in the industry as “I Was a Teenage Jesus” but many people today still think of Hunter as the definitive movie Christ. In addition to his time spent on the cross, Hunter was the original captain in the pilot for Star Trek. He is famous for turning down the lead role in the series so that he could concentrate on his film career, thus giving nice Jewish boy William Shatner a break of such monumental proportions that it could only have come from the hand of God.
My next Jesus was rock star Ted Neeley (also of the blond-haired, blue-eyed Semitic tribe) in Norman Jewison’s 1973 movie version of the Andrew Lloyd Weber rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. I loved this film, told from the troubled perspective of Carl Anderson’s Judas and featuring the sexy warblings of Yvonne Elliman’s Mary Magdelene:
Try not to get worried
Try not to turn on to
Problems that upset you
Oh, don’t you know
Everything’s alright
Yes, everything’s fine
And we want you to sleep well tonight
Let the world turn without you tonight.
A more upbeat competitor to Jesus Christ Superstar that year was the rock musical Godspell which introduced actor Victor Garber as a hippie Jesus who gathers a bunch of workers in modern-day New York and transforms them into his Disciples. David Haskell played Judas Iscariot and, like the actor who played Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar, died in his early 50s. If only they’d been around for the recent scholarly exoneration of Judas, maybe they wouldn’t have been cursed with such early deaths.
As far as the more recent depictions, I am a big fan of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ — one of the first films to ponder the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdelene (played by Barbara Hershey, formerly Barbara Herzstein). I thought Willem Dafoe did a great job as a tortured Jesus although he later said, “To this day, I can’t believe I was so brazen to think I could pull off the Jesus role.” While mostly praised for his performance at the time, Italian director Sergio Leone exclaimed, “This is the face of a murderer, not of Our Lord!”
I was not a fan of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ which I felt lacked enough context and seemed to me like a glorified snuff film. I’m sure that movie’s religious fans would say that I’m completely missing the point and they’re probably right. Gibson successfully marketed his movie as a religious experience designed for a very specific audience. I know we should never blame the son for the sins of the father, but I have to admit that it didn’t help my viewing experience to hear Mel Gibson’s crazy father shoot his mouth off just before the film’s release, making outrageous statements about the Holocaust. “It’s all—maybe not all fiction—but most of it is,” the elder Gibson said on a New York radio show, adding that the gas chambers and crematoria at camps like Auschwitz would not have been capable of exterminating so many people. Oy. Later, of course, Mel Gibson famously put his own foot in his mouth on numerous occasions, including a few tirades that didn’t exactly endear him to the Jewish community. The one thing I will give Mel Gibson credit for is casting James Caviezel as Jesus and finally breaking the blue-eyed barrier by digitally changing Caviezel’s blue eyes to brown before the film’s release.
I hope I don’t sound disrespectful on this holy day, I sure don’t mean to be. Despite my Jewish background, I’ve always been interested in learning more about the teachings of Jesus, ever since my Hebrew School teacher screamed when someone brought him up in class (“Don’t you EVER mention that name again!”). I find the story and message of Jesus Christ very inspiring, regardless of my own religious upbringing and beliefs. But, to be honest, I’ll take the friendly hippies of Godspell over the fire-and-brimstone ravings of the fundamentalists any day.
Father, hear thy children’s call
Humbly at thy feet we fall
Prodigals confessing all
We beseech thee, hear us!Come sing about Love!
That made us first to be
Come sing about Love!
That made the stone and tree
Come sing about Love!
That draws us lovingly
We beseech thee, hear us!
Now can someone pass me the matzoh and find the DVD for Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade?