King of Kings (Samuel Bronston Productions, MGM, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Easter Sunday “feature” on Turner Classic Movies was a showing of the Biblical epic King of Kings – not, alas, the Cecil B. DeMille silent film from 1927, a guilty pleasure of mine since it is so over-the-top (it begins with Mary Magdalene in the midst of her den of sin, ordering her servants to “Harness my zebras, a gift of the Nubian king” – though, like most movie “zebras,” they are just horses with stripes painted on them to make them look like zebras, an irony since actual zebras are closer to goats than horses), mostly in black-and-white but with a stunning depiction of the Resurrection in two-strip Technicolor. The title of the 1927 film is actually The King of Kings, with the article, but this version is from 1961 and abbreviated the title just to King of Kings, without the “The.” This film was produced by Samuel Bronston on his usual stomping grounds, Spain (two years later, when he made a film called 55 Days at Peking about the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China, he hired so many personnel from Chinese restaurants as extras that during his shoot it became virtually impossible to get a Chinese meal in Spain), though as one imdb,com “Trivia” contributor noted, his locations looked an awful lot like the traditional desert locales in the American Southwest used by plenty of Western producers over the years. (Four years after King of Kings, George Stevens would produce and direct his own biopic of Jesus Christ, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and shoot it in familiar Western locations, including Monument Valley, Utah, where John Ford had worked so often with impeccable results, artistically and commercially.)

Producer Bronston hired Nicholas Ray to direct, even though Ray’s previous films had generally been about modern-day people, usually young men living lives of alienation: They Live by Night, On Dangerous Ground, Bigger than Life and his best-known film, Rebel Without a Cause. In fact, Ray and Rebel star James Dean had talked about forming a production company together before Dean’s sudden and tragic death in an auto accident on September 30, 1955, and one of the many might-have-beens in Dean’s sadly truncated career was whether he might have been cast as Jesus if he’d still been alive when this film was made. Ray was obviously looking for a young-rebel type as Jesus, and the actor he did pick was Jeffrey Hunter, who was 33 at the time of filming (the same age as Jesus when he was crucified) but looked so much younger wags jokingly called the film I Was a Teenage Jesus. At least part of the problem may have been that when the film was previewed, audiences reacted derisively to the sight of Jeffrey Hunter’s chest hair, so the studio, MGM, ordered retakes in which Hunter’s chest was shaved – and so were his underarms.

King of Kings began as a personal project for director John Farrow (Mia Farrow’s father), who concocted a script based entirely on the four Gospels and using only dialogue from the Bible. His script was later declared unfilmable, and a new one was written by Philip Yordan, who “made his bones” with the script for Monogram’s Dillinger in 1945 and was known at the time mostly for films noir: Whistle Stop, The Chase and Suspense (all 1946), House of Strangers (1949), its Westernized remake Broken Lance (1954), The Harder They Fall (1956 – Humphrey Bogart’s last film) and a previous collaboration with Nicholas Ray on Johnny Guitar (1954, the sort of film noir in Western drag that had been box office since the success of Winchester .73 four years earlier). Among Yordan’s quirkier challenges was being the first screenwriter who had to write dialogue for a talking Jesus: not since the 1927 DeMille silent The King of Kings had Jesus’s face and body been shown on screen. Previous sound films that referenced him had depicted Jesus only as a shadowy figure with an occasional hand on someone else’s shoulder. MGM had concerns that what would now be called the “faith-based audience” would regard it as sacreligious that Jesus Christ would actually be played by a recognizable actor who would be shown speaking real lines, but that was the least of their problems with King of Kings.

The film as it stands is a leaden spectacle, with Ray’s direction occasionally lightening things up but all too many of the setups look like the banal religious scenes that get painted on velvet. The original cinematographer was Franz Planer, but he fell ill with heat exhaustion from the desert locations and two other cameramen, Milton Krasner and Miguel Berenguer (did I mention that this film was shot in Spain?) took his place. As things turned out, Nicholas Ray didn’t make it to the end of the shoot, either; he was reported to have had a “nervous breakdown” – though other sources say he was feuding with Bronston throughout the production until Bronston got tired of the arguments and fired him – and additional scenes were directed by Charles Walters, the inoffensive hack who had made the last Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film, The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) and had done similar fill-in work on Gigi (1958), directing about one-third of that film and shooting retakes in the U.S. of scenes originally shot by the director of record, Vincente Minnellli (Liza Minnelli’s father), in France. Reviewers at the time greeted King of Kings with withering scorn, pointing to the intense close-ups of Jesus with bright blue eyes and the overall artificiality of the spectacle.

Seen today, the biggest surprise is the prominence writer Yordan gave to Barabbas (Harry Guardino), who in this telling of the tale becomes a sort of anti-Jesus, essentially saying that the only way to defeat the Romans and get them the hell out of the Holy Land is by violence. The arguments between Jesus and Barabbas eerily anticipate the ones that would take place later in the 1960’s among African-American civil rights activists between the followers of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other supporters of nonviolent resistance and the so-called “Black Power” advocates who urged the Black community to arm themselves and prepare for a violent struggle with the forces of white supremacy. Just how the Blacks would gain the military capability to take on the U.S. armed forces and win a civil war was a question the “Black Power” advocates never really answered, and the attempts by the Black Panther Party and others on the “Black Power” side of the argument ended ignominiously in slaughters – just as Barabbas’ attempt to mount an armed assault on the palace of Pontius Pilate (Hurd Hatfield) and Herod Antipas (Frank Thring) ends up with them being mowed down en masse by Roman archers. The film is also a broad-strokes depiction of the brutality of imperialism – it was made just 16 years after the end of World War II and it’s hard to miss the parallels between what the Romans were doing to the Jews in this era and what the Nazis did to them nearly 2,000 years later.

In fact, watching this film today it’s hard to miss the similarity between what the Romans did to the people of Judea and what the Russians are now doing to the people of Ukraine: not only killing them en masse but obliterating their culture as well as their physical infrastructure. There’s an early scene in which the Roman general Pompey (Conrado San Martín) leads his army into the Temple of Solomon and draws back the curtain, hoping and expecting to find a great storehouse of golden statues he can melt down and steal – and instead there’s only a nondescript stone altar. The bits of King of Kings that work – including the fictitious character of Lucius (Ron Randell), a Roman soldier who encounters Jesus when Jesus was 12 and offers to adopt him as an apprentice (an offer a rather indignant Mary, played by Irish actress Siobhan McKenna, turns down) and doesn’t report him to the authorities even though his birth was not recorded in the Roman census, thanks to Mary’s and her husband Joseph’s [Gérard Tichy] having got a tip that Herod the Great [Grégoire Aslan] had ordered the slaughter of all male children two and under born in Bethlehem, and they fled to Egypt (though in this film only Mary and the baby Jesus flee and Joseph stays behind). I liked to joke during the (first) Trump administration that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were asylum seekers, fleeing a well-founded fear of persecution, and the Egyptian authorities were a lot easier on their asylum claim than the Trump administration.

Mention should also be made of the third-party narration that runs throughout this movie, written by Ray Bradbury and delivered by Orson Welles – both of them uncredited – and in particular Dwight Macdonald’s scorn that the narration whitewashed the two Jewish characters who were explicitly named as villains in the Gospels, Herod the Great and Judas Iscariot (Rip Torn). According to Bradbury’s narration, Herod was “an Arab of the Bedouin tribe” whom the Romans had installed as a sort of puppet ruler of Judea, and Judas betrayed Jesus because he hoped Jesus would work a miracle about himself and save himself at the last minute from the Cross. Macdonald, who was obviously feeling raw at the criticism he’d got from Jews over his review of the 1959 Ben-Hur, in which he’d criticized the film for having let the Jews off the hook and blaming the Crucifixion exclusively on the Romans, addressed the topic again when he reviewed King of Kings. He said that, “as a lapsed Presbyterian, I had assumed that the Biblical narration of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus was correct. Since then I have learned, by the chancy ways journalists learn things, that a good case can be made that the Bible writers played down the responsibility of the Romans and played up the responsibility of the Jews. So I’m willing to admit that the matter is obscure and my critics may be right about the historical facts. But I’m still not willing to admit that my error – if indeed it was such – is evidence of any anti-Semitic prejudices on my part.” (I’m quoting the above from memory here but I think I have the gist of what he wrote correctly.) Later, in his equally scathing review of The Greatest Story Ever Told, MacDonald wrote, “There are secular cows and there are sacred cows, and Israel is as much a sacred cow today (1965) as the Soviet Union was in the 1930’s,” when all too many progressives whitewashed the Soviet horrors out of sympathy for the socialist project.

It’s also worth noting that the scene in which Jesus calls out the people who want to stone the woman taken in adultery and says, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” was rather blah and did not have the impact it did in DeMille’s 1927 silent (in which Jesus actually uses his staff to trace in front of each person the name of their sin), and while the whole sequence of Herod Antipas promising his stepdaughter, the Princess Salomé (Brigid Bazlen), anything she wants if she’ll dance for him – and she demands the head of John the Baptist (Robert Ryan) on a silver platter – stems, as an imdb.com “Trivia” contributor acknowledged, from Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé rather than the Bible, the film omits Wilde’s account of Salomé’s exit (Herod Antipas orders his soldiers to crush Salomé to death with their shields because he’s so disgusted with her sexual by-play with John the Baptist’s head), and it occurred to me that though Miklós Rósza’s score for the overall film is quite good (except for the God-awful choruses which weigh down some of the cues), he didn’t come up with music for Salomé to dance to anywhere near the quality of Richard Strauss’s in his infamous opera based on Wilde’s play.