Touches You

Just what I expected

Good concept, poorly executed.

Fresh and Exciting

I was so bored by this movie. It is very boring. It is one of most boring movies I have seen. The story line is awful. It is a very boring movie. Do not see it. It is so boring.

Where's Lazarus? No Lazarus! These guys Bronston, Yordan and Ray certainly bear watching. Anyone capable of producing a life of Christ without Lazarus is just as likely to come up with a Nixon minus Watergate or Roosevelt without the New Deal or a Truman bereft of the atom bomb. And where's Peter, the big fisherman, the rock on whom the Christ was to build His church? Is that him milling around in the background somewhere? What are these guys doing with their 165 minutes? Pasolini managed to film a whole gospel in 142. Yet here we have 165 with no Lazarus, no woman at the well, no prodigal son, no good Samaritan, no wedding feast at Cana, no bed-ridden man lowered from the roof, no pigs running berserk, no storm at sea, no feeding of any multitudes, no expulsion of the money-changers out of the temple, no Pharisee and publican praying in the temple, no healings on the Sabbath day, no gnashing of teeth in the synagogue, no lepers made clean, no woman with internal bleeding touching his cloak, no rejection by the Nazarenes, no entrapping questions from the religious bigots. Other noes are too numerous to list. Above all though, no insistence on belief in Jesus as necessary for automatic entry into Paradise. Instead we get fantasy stuff like Jesus running about an artful mountainside spouting strings of collected sayings or visiting the Baptist in his prison cell; and a whole lot of absolute tosh about Barabbas, a minor if notorious robber who is imaginatively transformed from thief to patriot and often thrust center-stage and involved in a great deal of wholly fictitious xenophobic words and bloody if zealous deeds. There is so little here of the real Christ and so enormously much of the scriptwriter's misplaced imagination that only the merest shell of the messiah's life is presented: his birth, John the Baptist, the 40 days in the desert, the twelve apostles (particularly including Judas), his entry into Jerusalem, the last supper, his trial before Pilate, his crucifixion between two thieves, his burial and resurrection. Yordan's cut-to-the-bone, threadbare outline is bad enough. What is worse though is that he makes no apology for or distinction between what is gospel and what is purely Yordan. Anyone unfamiliar with or even just vague about the details in the gospel accounts could be pardoned for coming away from "The King of Kings" with a whole raft of deliberate distortions and out-and-out falsifications firmly embedded in their mind. P.S. Regarding the three cinematographers, Planer suffered a heat stroke halfway through and was replaced by Krasner, whilst Berenguer worked with the second unit.

Watch it only to marvel at the costume design and Salomé's dance. The script sounds like some bad Sunday-morning gospel broadcast, the wigs and fake beards are laughable. Robert Ryan looks either doped-up or ashamed. There are over-long scenes of people exchanging Significant Looks! The infant-death scenes look like outtakes from The Ten Commandments.This is a ponderous sea slug of a movie that you might put up as a silent background to some kind of ironic party. Cecil B. obviously took himself and his own religious beliefs very seriously--you have to wonder why he didn't take up TV evangelism.

Having seen this Movie again after so many years, I was still taken with the excellent production and the magnificent portrayal of Jesus Christ by Jeffrey Hunter. In the world of today, when Religion is facing so much turmoil, it was a revelation to see the sincerity of the producers in making this film. The locations were excellent, and a number of cameos by well-known stars made it great entertainment. Robert Ryan was a surprise as John, while Ron Randell, Hurd Hatfield, Viveca Lindfors were excellent. Frank Thring,in a small role as Pontius Pilate hammed it up as usual. While this movie was made before all the gimmicks of computerisation, it has been very well presented and stands up very well today. Worth a re-look.