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Max von Sydow carries a heavy burden in Steven's far-from The Greatest Story Ever Told |
The plot covers the whole life of the Saviour so should be
familiar to anyone who has ever seen a Gideon’s Bible. It was a passion project
for Stevens, who spent almost five years raising the cash to bring it to the
screen. When he started, the fad for self-important Biblical epics was starting
to teeter. When it hit the screen, it had flat-lined. It didn’t help that The
Greatest Story Ever Told was first released as an over four-hour snooze
fest, laboriously paced, that managed to drain any fire or passion from one of
(no matter what you believe) the most tumultuous and significant lives anyone
on the planet has ever led. The film was cut down to about two hours (making it
incomprehensible) and today exists as a little over three-hour epic that
genuinely still feels like it’s four hours long.
Stevens gets almost nothing right here whatsoever. Self-importance
permeates the entire project. The film cost $20million, double the largest
amount the studio had ever spent. Ordinary storyboards were not good enough:
Stevens commissioned 350 oil paintings (that’s right, an entire art gallery’s
worth) to plan the picture (which probably explains why the film feels at times
like a slide show of second-rate devotional imagery). The Pope was consulted on
the script (wisely he didn’t take a screen credit). Stevens decided the
American West made a better Holy Land than the actual Holy Land, so shot it all
in Arizona, Nevada and California. It took so long to film, Joseph Schildkraut
and original cinematographer William C Mellor both died while making it, while
Joanna Durham (playing Mary Magdalene!) became pregnant and gave birth. Stevens
shot 1,136 miles of film, enough to wrap around the Moon.
There’s something a little sad about all that effort so
completely wasted. But the film is a complete dud. It’s terminally slow, not
helped by its stately shooting style where the influence of all those paintings
can be seen. Everything is treated with crushing import – Jesus can’t draw
breath without a heavenly choir kicking in to add spiritual import to whatever
he is about to say. Stevens equates grandeur with long shots so a lot of stuff
happens in the widest framing possible, most ridiculously the resurrection of
Lazarus which takes place in a small part of a screen consumed with a vast
cliff panorama. Bizarrely, most of the miracles take place off-screen, as if
Stevens worried that seeing a man walk on water, feed the five thousand or turn
water into wine would stretch credulity (which surely can’t be the case for a
film as genuflecting as this one).
What we get instead is Ed Wynn, Sal Mineo and Van Heflin
euphorically running up a hilltop and shouting out loud the various miracles
the Lamb of God has bashfully performed off-screen. Everything takes a very
long time to happen and a large portion of the film is given over to a lot of
Christ walking, talking at people but not really doing anything. For all the
vast length, no real idea is given at all about what people were drawn to or
found magnetic about Him. It’s as if Stevens is so concerned to show He was
better than this world, that the film forgets to show that He was actually part
of this world. Instead, we have to kept being told what a charismatic
guy He is and how profound His message is: we never get to see or hear these
qualities from His own lips.
For a film designed to celebrate the Greatest, the film
strips out much of the awe and wonder in Him. It’s not helped by the chronic
miscasting of Max von Sydow. Selected because he was a great actor who would be
unfamiliar to the mid-West masses (presumably considered to be unlikely to be au
fait with the work of Ingmar Bergman), von Sydow is just plain wrong for
the role. His sonorous seriousness and restrained internal firmness help make
the Son of God a crushing, distant bore. He’s not helped by his dialogue being
entirely made-up of Bible quotes or the fact that Stevens directs him to be so
stationary and granite, with much middle-distance staring, he could have been replaced
with an Orthodox Icon with very little noticeable difference.
Around von Sydow, Stevens followed the norm by hiring as
many star actors as possible, some of whom pop up for a few seconds. The most
famous of these is of course John Wayne as the Centurion who crucifies Jesus.
This cameo has entered the realms of Filmic Myth (the legendary “More Awe!”exchange). Actually, Stevens shoots Wayne with embarrassment, as if knowing getting
this Western legend in is ridiculous – you can hardly spot Wayne (if you didn’t
know it was him, you wouldn’t) and his line is clearly a voiceover. In a way
just as egregious is Sidney Poitier’s wordless super-star appearance as Simon,
distracting you from feeling the pain of Jesus’ sacrifice by saying “Oh look that’s
Sidney Poitier” as he dips into frame to help carry the cross.
Of the actors who are in it long enough to make an impression, they fall into three camps: the OTT, the “staring with reverence” and the genuinely good. Of the OTT crowd, Rains and Ferrer set the bar early as various Herods but Heston steals the film as a rug-chested, manly John the Baptist, ducking heads under water in a Nevada lake, bellowing scripture to the heavens. Of the reverent, McDowell does some hard thinking as Matthew, although I have a certain fondness for Gary Raymond’s decent but chronically unreliable Peter (the scene where he bitches endlessly about a stolen cloak is possibly the only chuckle in the movie).
It’s a sad state of affairs that the Genuinely Good actors
all play the Genuinely Bad characters – poor old Jesus, even in the story of
his life the Devil gets all the best scenes. That’s literally true here as
Donald Pleasence is head-and-shoulders best-in-show as a softly spoken,
insinuating but deeply sinister “Dark Hermit” who tempts Jesus in the
wilderness and then follows Him throughout the Holy Land, turning others against
Him. Also good are David McCallum as a conflicted Judas, Telly Savalas as weary
Pilate (he shaved his head for the role, loved the look and never went back)
and Martin Landau, good value as a corrupt Caiaphas (“This will all be
forgotten in a week” he signs the film off with saying).
That’s about all there is to enjoy about a film that
probably did more to reduce attendance at Sunday School than the introduction
of Sunday opening hours and football being played all day. A passion project
from Stevens where he forgot to put any of that passion on the screen, it
really is as long and boring as you heard, a film made with such reverent skill
that no one seemed to have thought about stopping and saying “well, yes, but is
it good?”. I doubt anyone is watching it up in Heaven.
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