The story of Jesus of Nazareth is one that is difficult to tell in written words, let alone in film. To be sure, it is not hallowed ground – the Roman Catholic Church permits these adaptations freely, not like Islamic institutions who are sensitive to adaptations of their own prophet Mohammed. However, there appears a number of constraints and restrictions that are otherwise absent if one makes a conventional film with a conventional character in its narrative center. For one, the director is constrained with telling the story faithfully to Jesus’s biblical sources. The scriptwriter, on the other hand, has the dilemma of choosing among the four distinct portraits of Jesus in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, the Jesus presented in the Acts of the Apostles and in the epistles, and the Jesus announced and even described in some of the books of the Old Testament.
From another perspective, the actor is concerned with the feedback of the mostly-Roman Catholic viewing audience, regarding his performance, and sometimes with respect to mundane characteristics as his likeness to the character. The producer, too, is constrained by the “sellability” of the film, since the story of Jesus is one that has been told and retold in the long history of Roman Catholicism – surely, they would not want to watch it again. Much more can be said of the dangers of anti-Semitism, as Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ (2005) may illustrate. And yet, given these concerns that have so plagued filmic adaptations of Jesus of Nazareth’s story, there are still some who strive to convey the narrative through the celluloid.
Nicolas Ray, in King of Kings (1961) is among the foremost storytellers in this league. The film was released in the 1960s, where there was an explosion of biblical epics and, in particular, of “Jesus films”. One can examine Ray’s King of Kings, thus, as a filmic product of a larger cultural phenomenon. At a time where the United States was culturally at war with itself, the film was a product of a conservative attempt to “educate” a youth sector reeling from Vietnam and experiencing the widespread effects of the sexual revolution. King of Kings, then, like any other cinematic production, is a result of the cultural situation of a particular era. The codes that it uses within the filmic frame belies this conclusion, with Ray manipulating the mise en scene, cinematography, and other cinematic elements to convey a Jesus narrative that reinforces traditional Roman Catholic beliefs, and serves as a subtle conservative reminder for the troubled youth of the 1960s.
A Brief Historical Background of the Jesus Narrative
Before anything else, it is perhaps first important to note the early beginnings of the Jesus film tradition, from the first silent representations of the passion play until the early biblical epics, such as King of Kings. Even from the early years of the cinematic medium, there has already been a dilemma in the representation of Jesus in the celluloid. As the early filmmakers during this era put it:
“How are we to deal with the problems created by the appropriation of sacred texts by a medium of illusion like cinema, or by the adaptation of a story that is presumed true into a vehicle of fiction?” (Gaudreault 95).
The very first Jesus films appeared in 1897, barely two years after the debut of cinema as a medium. The first production was in France, entitled Lear Passion, and was produced for a publishing house, La Bonne Presse (Baugh 8). The film lasted only five minutes, and the film is now considered lost, with all copies nowhere to be found. A second film was a record of the Passion Play performed at Horitz in Bohemia. An American production, The Horitz Passion Play was composed of a maximum of forty-five scenes, and included documentary footage of the town, the theater, and the preparation of the actors in addition to scenes from the Old Testament and the New Testament. Georges Melies himself, that magician of the cinema and pioneer of the seventh art, produced his own rendition of the Jesus narrative, with his short film, Christ Walking on the Waters – thirty five seconds of special effects exhibition used to depict the miracle of Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee.
The high point of the early Jesus films was, however, the Jesus episode in D.W. Griffith’s, three-and-a-half-hour epic Intolerance (1916). Introducing the passion with the episode of the woman taken in adultery and that of the wedding feast at Cana, Griffith utilized the episode as an illustration of how an innocent man is condemned to death. Griffith also portrayed the leaders of the Jewish community as the blatant figures that were responsible for Jesus’ death. Not long after Griffith’s epic, Cecil B. DeMille released his own filmic adaptation of the Passion, in The King of Kings.
Released in 1927, the film was the first among a long line of monumental Jesus films that were crafted to be colossal biblical epics, in line with other productions such as Cabiria and Quo Vadis?. Four years earlier, DeMille had also directed a biblical spectacular, The Ten Commandments, and he had also followed The King of Kings with the story of the early Christians – The Sign of the Cross, in 1932.
Starting from DeMille, Hollywood’s religious and biblical spectaculars from the 1920s to the 1960s visually reinforced a faith in America’s capitalist empire (Walsh 12). The King of Kings itself omits Jesus’ ascetic teaching in order to offer a Jesus palatable to middle-class Protestant America. DeMille, in essence, “capitalizes” on the Jesus narrative, transforming him from a peasant, into an icon of the American middle class. The philosophy behind The King of Kings is immediately apparent: wealth should be possessed dutifully, not hedonistically – the latter is wrong and runs counter to the teachings of the Bible. The epics of the 1950s, mainly in the midst of the Cold War, continued DeMille’s pattern. For the biblical narratives that appeared during this time, the Romans play the role of the profligate hedonists while Jesus represents the appropriate attitude towards wealth and private enterprise. The Romans find their salvation by learning to possess empire and wealth properly – neither wealth nor empire is implicitly wrong (Walsh 12). Moreover, the decades that followed DeMille’s first biblical spectacular saw the representation of Jesus as a secondary character. Films such as Ben-Hur and Barabbas saw Jesus within the narrative as an insignificant character, without a strong physical, moral, or spiritual impact. As Lloyd Baugh observes:
“It is interesting to note, for example, that in spite of Ben-Hur's meetings with Jesus, that seem pregnant with significance, superstar Charlton Heston's hero does not undergo a clearly Christian conversion” (16).
Appraising Nicolas Ray’s King of Kings
Given the foregoing discussion on the political and economic sentiments of the time, it is now important to appraise Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings in its position within the Jesus film tradition, as well as its value as a cultural product of the Cold War and of the ensuing decade. It is also particularly important to note that Ray’s films is just one among a line of Jesus films – a genre created long before the 1960s, complete with tropes, generically-apt mise en scene, and narrative peculiarities that characterize a certain category.
Once dismissed as a failure, Ray’s film has, in subsequent years, enjoyed a critical reappraisal in his oeuvre (McKahan 219). Over three hours in length and costing eight million dollars, King of Kings starred Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus and many other well-known Hollywood actors, as well as a voiceover narration by Orson Welles (Baugh 18). Situated within the sociopolitical context of the early 1960s, it is easy to observe King of Kings as Ray’s personal articulation of secular humanism, albeit respectful of tradition in post-World War II America.
The narrative of Ray’s King of Kings assumes a fourfold structure: firstly, an elaborate introduction; secondly, a time for miracles; thirdly, a training of the disciples; and fourth, a hostile Jerusalem ministry. As Walsh argues, this is primarily derived from the Gospel of Luke, which also has a fourfold structure (122). The introduction deals with the tragedy of Rome’s imperial oppression of the Jews, rather than divine salvation. The Jewish people survive through their hope of a savior, and they eventually find it in Barabbas, not Jesus, who falls victim to Pontius Pilate and to the cross. Both Luke and the narrative of King of Kings locate Jesus in the politics and history of first-century Palestine. In the process, Ray secularizes Jesus and creates the problem of his history by placing his story in the midst of imperial politics. The course of the film, for example, is initiated by the mechanisms of Pompey and his profanation of the Temple. As the opening narration, written by Ray Bradbury and performed by Welles, goes:
“Thus, for more than 50 years after Pompey's invasion, the history of Judea could be read by the light of burning townsBut Caesar could find no Jew to press Rome’s laws on this fallen land, so Caesar named one Herod the Great, an Arab of the Bedouin tribe, as the new, false an maleficent King of the Jews. But from the dust of Herod’s feet, rebellions of Jews rose up, and Herod, in reply, planted evil seeds from which forests of Roman crosses grew high on Jerusalem’s hills”
Ray’s placement of Jesus in the political, universal sphere may also be seen in the character of Barabbas, who serves as the film’s primary antagonist. Barabbas may be seen as the counterpoint to Jesus: whereas the former is the messiah of war, the latter is seen as the messiah of peace. “The implication, an ominous one in Cold War America”, Walsh notes, “is that by choosing, the Jews (and Americans?) have failed to escape the ‘spiral of violence’ begun by Pompey’s colonization” (Walsh 130). Ray thus situates the Jesus narrative within the wider sociopolitical sphere of Cold War American conservatism, eager to reaffirm the values of capitalism – originally articulated by DeMille – against the external threat of communist ideology.
Nicholas Ray’s philosophy of secular humanism is apparent in King of Kings. To be sure, the American market is rife with tendencies that put the individual in the highest pillar of culture and society. Ultimately and finally, the individual is sacred. He is the source of power and meaning in American culture. Individualism, to, is the defining mythic identity, and cultural products such as films and television programs implore each and every American to “be himself”. To be sure, the film does everything to limit the scope and range of Jesus’ messianic identity and role. As Lloyd Baugh observes:
“His preaching is limited to the scene of the Sermon on the Mount, and this gives it a detached, out-of-touch quality, anything but the case with the Jesus of the gospels. Then what Ray's Jesus does say is strangely without any incisive or challenging quality, almost an academic exercise” (23).
Moreover, only two minor miracles are represented within the film, as well as one exorcism. Ray seems to deliberately avoid the major miracles, such as the resurrection of Lazarus, as well as the cleaning of the lepers and the feeding of the five thousand. The minor miracles themselves appear to happen out of “natural causes”. Ray, thus, humanizes Jesus. This process creates a false binary between “private” and “public” identities. The result is the stripping away the pretense of “inner life”, eventually leading King of Kings to become meaningful to audiences because of the transposition of Cold War ideology upon the social-symbolic identities of biblical figures (McKahan 223).
Works Cited
Baugh, Lloyd. Imaging the Divine: Jesus and Christ-Figures in Film. Kansas: Sheed and Ward, 1997. Print.
Gaudreault, Andre. "La Passion du Christ: une forme, un genre, un discours," in An Invention of the Devil? Religion and the Early Cinema, edited by Roland Cosandey, Andre Gaudreault, Tom Gunning. Sainte Foy, Canada: Les Presses" de l'Universite Laval, 1992. Print.
McKahan, Jason. “King of Kings and the Politics of Masculinity in the Cold War Biblical Epic” in Steven Rybin and Will Scheibel (eds.) Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground: Nicholas Ray in American Cinema.
Walsh, Richard G. Reading the Gospels in the Dark: Portrayals of Jesus in Film. New York: Trinity Press International, 2003. Print.
