After Pride I’d wanted to run the 1951 TV-movie Hill Number One for my husband Charles and I because it takes place on the Saturday between Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and his resurrection. It would be a totally forgotten piece of early-TV flotsam if it weren’t for the actor who played the Apostle John, a young man named James Dean who went on to a tragically brief but hugely important career. Charles and I first encountered Hill Number One as part of a two-tape VHS boxed et from Madacy Home Video in the mid-1990’s along with a 1957 documentary about Dean called The James Dean Story, produced by George W. George and directed by a then-unknown young filmmaker named Robert Altman. At the time neither Charles nor I were all that impressed by it – Charles joked that if Ed Wood had made the religious movies he was hopign tofinance with the “success” of Plan Nine from Outer Space, they’d have looked a lot like this,and I was put off by the credited director, Arthur Pierson. My only other knowledge of Pierson is as the writer and director of Home Town Story, an MGM release (also from 1951) with a really putrid screenplay that starts out like Frank Capra and ends up as Ayn Rand: The big bad capitalist we’ve been led to hate throughout the movie finally turns out to be a super-good guy whose money solves everyone’s problems. Like Hill Number One, Home Town Story has maintained a toehold in the cultural imagination solely because it features a tragically short-lived star at the outset of a major career – in this case, Marilyn Monroe.
I liked Hill Number One a lot better when Charles and I re-watched it as part of the James Dean three-DVD boxed set of all (or almost all) his surviving television appearances released in 2016. Though Pierson’s direction and the script by James D. Roche still seem unbearably preachy at times, I give the film credit for dramatizing one of the least understood and mythologized parts of Christian history: the uncertainty the disciples faced during those nervous two days after the crucifixion when they had no idea what would become of their movement now that their leader had been killed by the Roman and Jewish bad guys. (Balancing the guilt of both sides is one of the trickiest parts of telling the Jesus story; too much emphasis on the guilt of the Jews rather than the Romans and you get accused of anti-Semitism.) Hill Number One starts with a framing sequence set during the Korean War, which was still going on when this film was made. A company of U.S. soldiers is mounting an artillery barrage to soften up the Defenses on a particular hill, and when they’re told to knock it off so the infantry can charge up the hill and take it, the men start debating the futility of the struggle. “The Professor” (Roddy McDowall) reminds the soldiers that it’s Easter Sunday, and a priest (Gordon Oliver) shows up in a Jeep with a pot of the long-awaited coffee the soldiers have asked for and a parable of how Hill Number One – Calvary – was taken nearly 2,000 years before by just one person.
The film then flashes back to Biblical times, and in particular the emtombment of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea (Nelson Leigh) and Nicodemus (Regis Toomey), who beg Pontius Pilate (Leif Erickson) for the body of Jesus so they can bury ti in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb. Pilate is surprised that someone as wealthy and well-connected as Joseph was interested in the teachings of Jesus, who had ministered mostly to the poor. Pilate is also concerned that after the crucifixion various people in his entourage, including his legion commander Cassius (Henry Brandon), knelt at the feet of the crucified Christ. Cassius says that he pierced Jesus’s side with his spear, blood and water splashed out of the wound, and some of the liquid went into his eyes and cured him of a squint he’d had all his life..Eventually it turns out that Pilate’s wife Claudia (Joan Leslie) has decided to leave him and devote herself to the new religion – Roche’s script way anachronistically calls the followers of Jesus “Christians,” a term that didn’t come into use for several more decades. While one of this film’s odder conceits is that the mere presense of Jesus in the flesh, as it were, could convert people and lead them to take the considerable risk of proclaiming him the “Son of God,” Hill Number One is a film I’ve come to like a lot better over the years, especially as my own feelings about religion have mellowed.
While I still don’t consider myself a religious believer, I have a lot more respect than U once did for those who do believe. I still can’t stand people who try to inflict their spiritual beliefs, and in particular their notions of what constitutes “sin,” on everybody else, but as I've acquired more respect for God, religion and believers in general my feelings about Hill Number One have become a lot more positive now than they were when I first saw it. Even though much of it either teeters on the edge of high camp or actually goes over (notably the scene in which Joseph and Nicodemus seek out the”Spice Woman” Mara, played by Pauline Crell, and the risible commercial for rosary beads at the end delivered by Father Patrick Peyton, who as I said on a previous go-round with this film looked like what the Central Casting Bureau would have sent you if you called them and said, “Send us an Irish-American Catholic priest”), Hill NUmber One achieves a surprising level of quality. Part of the good news is the cast, which tapped a lot of genuinely talented Hollywood “B”-listers – not only Erickson, Toomey and McDowall but Gene Lockhart as Matthew, Ruth Hussey as Jesus’s mother Mary and James Cagney’s sister Jeanne as Mary Magdalene. )The film is an odd reunion of Ms. Cagney and Leslie from Yankee Doodle Dandy, made nine years earlier, in which Jeanne Cagney played James Cagney’s sister and Joan Leslie played his wife.) Despite the inevitable tackiness of the settings and the locations – Jesus’s tomb is in a locale familiar to Republci Western and serial watchers and the sets are pretty obviously either fake or recycled from bigger-budgeted films – Hill Number One deserves points for sincerity and for making the most of what they had. But both Charles and I agreed afterwards that the film could have benefited from more footage of James Dean!
