Griffith's "Intolerance" (1916) made him one of four interlocking stories of of man's inhumanity to man. Jesus has been a movie star ever since D.W. They were giving those audiences what they wanted, and what they expected to see."
You're dealing with a middle class which was, in those days especially, a WASPy white audience. "And I think they played to the audience in terms of how they portrayed Jesus. "These large production companies understood who their audience was," Page said. The image of Christ - borrowed from medieval and Renaissance painting - as a blond, blue-eyed European is as demographically unlikely as it is, nowadays, culturally troubling. What Hollywood can be blamed for is standardizing Jesus. The movie moguls were following an old tradition. And that's not to mention the apocrypha, the "gnostic" gospels, The Gospel of Thomas, The Secret Book of John. In Matthew, the baby Jesus is visited by three wise men. "All have been, as art or as religion, indecent."īut much as the Hollywood versions of Jesus may deviate from scripture, it's worth remembering that the Bible also has different versions of Jesus - and they deviate from each other. "It seems to be impossible for this Christian civilization to make a decent movie about the life of its founder," wrote critic Dwight Macdonald in 1965. The more cynical - and the more devout - may scoff at all this Hollywood piety. "You don't see Him, and to me that creates and accentuates the mystery of Christ on Earth," Page said. General Lew Wallace subtitled his original book "A Tale of The Christ." But make no mistake: He's the real star of the show. Jesus is, technically speaking, a walk-on in "Ben Hur" - in both films He is seen only fleetingly, as an outstretched hand, or from the back of a head. For good measure, he'll be showing "The Ten Commandments" at 7 p.m. Saturday, April 8) and in 1959 as an 11-Oscar-winning blockbuster (7 p.m. Page himself is showing one of the classics, "Ben Hur." Or rather, two of the classics - since "Ben Hur" was box office gold on two occasions, in 1925 as a silent spectacular (2 p.m. "But it's also incredibly impactful, and that's why audiences came back, time and again."ĭuring the Easter season, movies about Jesus are liable to pop up on screens big and small. DeMille sword and sandal movie, you say, 'Oh my God, it's corny,' " said Nelson Page, executive director of the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee. Whether it's supplying Moses with a girlfriend ("The Ten Commandments," 1956) or giving Samson lines like "Your arms were quicksand! Your kiss was death!" ("Samson and Delilah," 1949), biblical blockbusters are proof, whatever the scriptures say, that is is possible to serve two masters: God, and the box office. He did not say "camera" and "action." But Hollywood has never been slow to improve on an author - nowhere more so than in the films based on biblical subjects. Watch Video: Dying an Easter egg with rice
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