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The show business of the Gospel or vice-versa, the Cecil B. DeMille phantasmagoria not quite smothered by reverence. The prophet possesses "some magical power," discussed as hearsay amid revelers in a feast held by Mary Magdalene (Jacqueline Logan), who's mighty sure of the force of her own beauty: "I have blinded more men than He hath ever healed!" The zebra-drawn chariot brings her to the site of miracles, where a boy's restored vision gives H.B. Warner's Jesus in close-up like a supernova slowly taking human form. "I am come a light into the world..." (His gaze causes the party girl's sins to leap out of her like frightened phantoms.) A large-scale book illustration, with scripture for intertitles. Christ is a shimmering fixture in multi-plane tableaux—it takes two or three tipped tables at the temple to trigger a stampede of moneychangers, nevertheless the former carpenter is disarmingly bashful when a little girl presents a doll in need of mending. Judas (Joseph Schildkraut) is a weasel angling for a promotion (the heaviness of his pieces of silver is remembered in Ford's The Informer), Ernest Torrence as burly Peter might be Little John looking for Robin Hood. The raising of Lazarus, the Last Supper and the Via Dolorosa all bear Griffith's lessons from Intolerance. "The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." Pilate (Victor Varconi) sits on a giant, eagle-shaped throne that catches fire before Caiaphas (Rudolph Schildkraut), all part of the thunderstruck spectacle DeMille engineers to follow up the Crucifixion. Blossoms and doves and Technicolor for the Resurrection, Jesus over a modern city like King Kong, "with you always." Ray has the official remake, Capra the unofficial one (Meet John Doe). With Dorothy Cumming, Robert Edeson, and Julia Faye. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |