The Greatest Story Ever Told

Original Program

NO REAL THING

The image of Max von Sydow as Christ in George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told is the epitome of iconolatry. Delivering the homilies, platitudes and epigrams with artful clarity, he’s the souvenir essence of Michelangelo or Raphael, mollifying white Christians who wouldn’t be able to handle the realities of Christ’s ethnicity as suggested by The Discovery Channel’s misnomered Jesus: The Complete Story, or the Popular Mechanics cover depicting what a real Christ might have looked like. The seamless Cinerama hugeness magnifies the mythology: Stevens and cinematographers William C. Mellor and Loyal Griggs fuse reverence with general skepticism by using nature as bond, with the magnificent American west panoramas—think Ansel Adams in color—as faith enhancers. (Alternately there are darkly-lit granite-filled interrogation halls as depressants.) For those who never viewed Greatest Story on the big screen, or have seen only the dreadful pan & scan versions, about the closest you can ever hope to get to the intended giant Sierra Club sweep is to watch the egregiously sloppy Blu-rays on a large TV. (Calling restorer David Strohmaier to the rescue.) But is Greatest Story, even in its premiere state, a good movie? No. Exempting the resplendent outdoor visuals, Max’s effectual earnestness and the two Herods, Claude Rains and Jose Ferrer, as outstanding guest stars, the epic downer is festooned with too many celebrity distractions. Aware of the gamble, Stevens said future audiences wouldn’t know who most of top 40 were. More than sixty years later, and with an ever-enlarging menu of decades of boobtube material, maybe, maybe not. Piling on the 60s star power, it’s difficult to get beyond Charlton Heston lumberjacking John the Baptist, or Sidney Poitier, Telly Savalas, Angela Lansbury or John Wayne. We endure Joanna Dunham as Mary Magdalene (Stevens wanted Elizabeth Taylor) looking more like Karen Black than Karen Black, and Shelley Winters goes Bronxy Brooklyn in sandy Judea. Contriving drabby white and tan costuming to mix with sporadic flashes of dark browns, red and harlot green, the whole thing’s over-the-top reverential via Verdi’s “Messa di Requiem” and an Alfred Newman-acknowledged “echo” of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” And indulgently long: though the version TCM airs is said to be the original roadshow presentation, most assuredly I can report it’s not. At least twenty five minutes are missing and have been since the earliest days of the reserved seat engagement, and possibly more if in fact the original cut ran, as reported, 260 minutes. (The relative few who saw what is defined as the premiere 224 minute cut continue to talk about hearing the extended dropping of those thirty pieces of silver on the soundtrack; those sound effects were eliminated two weeks after the national opening.) Max called the picture “a moving failure.” After all the calamities and travails during the making and the eighteen months of editing, and the additional edits requested by theatres and United Artsists following the premiere, Stevens admittedly recognized it was a disappointment. He would also say, however, that given the opportunity to remake it, he’d make the same film.

That insistence is taxingly connotative in Steven’s gloomy evangelicalism and helped create still on-going contention: he insisted on not using all of Alfred Newman’s score written expressly for the picture and instead used portions of Newman’s music from The Robe. According to Oscar-winning musical adapter Ken Darby’s 1992 Scarecrow Press book Hollywood Holyland: The Filming and Scoring of TGSET, published after his death, battles erupted over Stevens’ decisions to mangle up some of Newman’s original compositions and yanking a chorus piece supervised by Darby in favor of Handel’s “Messiah.” Infuriated, Newman tried to remove his name from the credits. (From one of Film Score Monthly’s chatboard members, “The total recording time for the music was 140 hours, and involved 1,057 musicians and 386 singers. There were 35 minutes of music that were rewritten or revised more than once.” The member does not include the very expensive fact that it took 23 weeks to record Newman’s compositions.) Though Stevens had fully contracted “final cut” rights, there were fights over length before release and the subsequent multiple prunings after the allegedly intended 260 minute opener and then the official premiere print. The music and cuts, from my perspective, aren’t the only central issues, as there’s Stevens’ lack of proportionality, about which Shana Alexander in Life quipped “is so stupefying that I felt not uplifted but sandbagged.” And in the midst of nature’s wonders as proof of God’s love there are the various and patently phony glass shots; Herod Antipas’s intimate elite guards looking as if they’ve been recuited from a leather bar; those annoying flashing mirrors subbing for aureoles circling Max’s face. (Along with purchasing the drenched-in-black souvenir program without annotation, patrons could buy packets of less-than-stellar color stills ready for framing to hang in private chapels, a marketing ploy in defiance of Jesus’s cleansing of the temple.) Without credit Jean Negulesco and David Lean were asked to direct segments, the former helming some Jerusalem street scenes and probably the nativity sequence and the latter doing the Rains & Ferrer scenes. A box office failure, Greatest Story was named one of the worst movies of its year by the Harvard Lampoon and won its Please-Don’t-Put-Us-Through-DeMille-Again Award. Filmed in Ultra-Panavision 70, though for the first three days of principal shooting 3 strip Cinerama was used. (The process was also used for pre-testing costumes and locations.) For roadshow engagements, single lens Cinerama projection was, perhaps for the only time, spectacularly utilized. A top candidate for a complete restoration using the under-utilized SmileBox technology. (Opening 3/10/1965 at the McVickers, running 29 weeks).

Oscar nominations for Mellor (who died on set after suffering a heart attack) and Griggs for color cinematography; Newman for musical score—substantially original; Vittorio Nino Novarese and Marjorie Best for color costumes; color art direction-set decoration and for special visual effects.

Who’s who: Michael Anderson Jr. (James the Younger), Michael Ansara (Herod’s commander), Carroll Baker (Veronica), Ina Balin (Martha of Bethany), Robert Blake (Simon the Zealot), Pat Boone (Angel at the Tomb), Victor Buono (Sorak), John Considine (John), Richard Conte (Barabbas), Philip Coolidge (Chuza), Cyril Delevanti (Melchior), Joanna Dunham (Mary Magdalene), Jamie Farr (Thaddaeus), José Ferrer (Herod Antipas), David Hedison (Philip), Van Heflin (Bar Amand), Charlton Heston (John the Baptist), Martin Landau (Caiaphas), Angela Lansbury (Claudia), Robert Loggia (Joseph), John Lupton (Speaker of Capernaum), Janet Margolin (Mary of Bethany), David McCallum (Judas Iscariot), Roddy McDowall (Matthew), Dorothy McGuire (The Virgin Mary), Sal Mineo (Uriah), Nehemiah Persoff (Shemiah), Donald Pleasence (Satan), Sidney Poitier (Simon of Cyrene), Claude Rains (King Herod), Gary Raymond (Peter), Telly Savalas (Pontius Pilate), Joseph Schildkraut (Nicodemus), Marian Seldes (Herodias), Paul Stewart (Questor), Harold J. Stone (Gen. Varus), John Wayne (Centurion at crucifixion), Shelley Winters (Woman who is healed), Ed Wynn (Old Aram).

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