4:30 PM: Barabbas, a 1961 epic based on a novel by Pär Lagerkvist, stars Anthony Quinn as a footnote historical character, the "rebel and robber" who the rabble selected, out of the same pool that included Jesus, to be spared execution and set free. The movie, directed by Richard Fleischer, starts right out of the gate with the scene of Barabbas being pulled out of holding cell and turned loose, and the minor-character's-eye view on important historical (Biblical) events has me thinking of Monty Python's Life of Brian even before Quinn backed into the crucifix being prepared for Jesus and the Foley guy, having a little fun, provided the sound effect to go with Quinn hitting his head with what sounded like someone smacking a hollow coconut. This was an international production, shot in Rome and produced by Dino De Laurentiis for Columbia Pictures, with a cast that includes Silvana Mangano (as Barabbas's old flame, who has fallen under Jesus's sway while her boyfriend had been in the jug, and who talks about her new crush as if she prayed to a picture of him that she tore out of Tiger Beat), Arthur Kennedy as Pilate, Katy Jurado, Harry Andrews, Vittorio Gassman, Ernest Borgnine, and Jack Palance as, shockingly, a bad guy. It features some weird, faintly arty effects--such as the synthesizer-like sounds that accompany the sight of a whip lashing Jesus's back--that might have just been in the air of Rome during the time of Fellini's greatest popular successes, and it's very badly dubbed, with a lot of awkward chatter when there are more than three people on the screen: "Hey, look, it's Barabbas!" "Look, everybody, Barabbas is out!" "What's it like to be free, Barabbas?" If Quinn seems to be about as right in the lead role as anybody could be, that may be because, after so many international-cast jobs, he had developed the weird ability to sound dubbed while speaking in what was clearly his own voice, if only because nobody else could deliver a bad line like "You're afraid to look at me because I'm alive!" in quite the same way, as if he regretted that he couldn't have it tattooed on his forehead. When this lowlife staggers into the local watering hole and all the other lowlifes start jabbering in other people's voice, Barabbas has the special feel of a spaghetti Western religious epic.
Eventually, Sylvano Mangana is stoned to death, after which the movie gets a whole lot uglier-looking, and the powers that be, incarnated by Pilate, come to a fresh realization that having given a promise to never execute Anthony Quinn can really leave you up a creek without a paddle, since he's never going to behave and you can't always count on him to fall in a hole or drink himself to death. After following Quinn through numerous adventures that serve to broaden and humanize his rotten bastard's viewpoint, the movie is so desperate to end somehow that it settles for having the Romans forget all about their vow and crucify his shivering ass anyway, though by the time of the concluding shot, he's so ripe for martyrdom that it's a wonder they don't have to restrain him from scampering up the nearest ladder and trying to beat the nails in himself. So it turns out that the answer to the trivia question, "Whatever happened to the guy who was freed in place of Jesus?" is, "If you mean when he was being played by Anthony Quinn, the same thing that would have happened to him anyway." Barabbas runs two hours and twenty-four minutes, which is about the standard length of time it takes for a Biblical epic to make its way back top square one.
7:00 PM: Easter Parade (1947): This MGM musical, with an Irving Berlin score, stars Fred Astaire as Pontius Pilate and Judy Garland as Mary Magdalene. When Fred spots Judy in the audience at the Sermon on the Mount, he falls for her on sight, but he can't make time with her because she's hung up on Jesus (Peter Lawford). So he works out a deal with Judas Iscariot (Mickey Rooney), an old Glee Club pal who's now a member of Jesus's entourage, to have him set up and arrested, so that Fred will have an excuse to talk to Judy and can impress her by arranging to have Jesus be the accused man who is traditionally awarded a pardon on the big holiday. But then, when the accused men are presented to the public, a thief named Barabbas (Gene Kelly), who's been taking lessons from Salome (Rita Hayworth) on the sly, unexpectedly cuts loose with a terrific dance solo, which creates a groundswell of support for his release, and unless Fred can think of something fast...Okay, I'm kidding. I don't mean to suggest a lack of gratitude for any break in the steady diet of sackcloth and ashes shit either, but this movie does fit kind of strangely into this overall tapestry. It's also not my favorite movie musical; I think it's supposed to be the biggest hit of Astaire's career, but I think that Sabrina actually did better at the box office than The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, too. It does have its high point. Watch it here while I go check to see what's going on at The Amazing Race.
9:00 PM: Nicholas Ray's 1961 version of King of KIngs, starring Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus--the first movie I've seen these past couple of days in which J.C. actually has a prominent on-screen role. The first half hour or so is all about setting the stage for his arrival by establishing the cultural and political context surrounding him, and so far as the characters I've been watching all day are concerned, it's like old-school week. Hurd Hatfield shows up as Pontius Pilate, pissed off that his wife's connections couldn't get him a better position than governor of a podunk town like Jerusalem; Frank Thring, who played Pilate in Ben-Hur, is Herod, drooling over his stepdaughter Salome and wishing that John the Baptist, played by Robert Ryan in a Grizzly Adams beard and hairpiece, would put a sock in it; and Barabbas, played Harry Guardino, is running around with his sidekick Judas, playing by Rip motherfuckin' Torn my pretties, trying to stir up revolution. Not the apolitical sneak thief that Anthony Quinn seemed to think he was playing, this Barabbas is conceived as the Malcolm X to Jesus's MLK, Jr. When he first learns of the Messiah's arrival, he hopes to plug into his charismatic teachings and join forces to fight the Romans, but instead, he's disillusioned by the touchy-feeliness of the Sermon of the Mount, after which he urges Judas to sell the hippie bastard out. On top of that, he can't get Orson Welles, who supplies the voice-over narration, to agree with the rest of the movie about how to pronounce his damn name; Welles gives the middle "a" a different tilt than the on-screen cast.
It's a strange thing just to see a Hollywood Biblical epic directed by a cult wild man like Ray. Maybe because of who made it, I know that some people think it must be something very different from the run of Christ story spectaculars; I remember seeing Martin Scorsese grooving out to its wide screen images in a British TV documentary made around the time of The Last Temptation of Christ. But despite the political thread running through it, which can be used as a metaphorical stand-in for anything you want, it mostly just looks like a standard run-through of all the scenes you expect to see in one of these movies, and at two hours and forty-eight minutes, I do mean all of them. Most of the actors, including Robert Ryan, seem at a loss at to what style they should be playing their roles in, with Hunter's performance in particular a sterling example of why taking on the role of Jesus used to be regarded as a career killer in Hollywood. (It may still be considered a career killer, but when's the last time you got to see somebody do it? And when's the last time you saw James Caviezel?) Hunter walks through the movie delivering his minds in a medicated stupor of a voice and manages to be amazingly uninteresting, especially since, between his intense, burning eyes and his inappropriately mean-looking smile, there are times when he actually out-crazy-faces Rip Torn.
12:00 AM: The day wraps up with with Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 silent King of Kings. This is kind of a nice way to bring things full circle. It's no more innocent, and at times at least as puke worthy, as any of the movies from the 1950s, but it's from such a distant point in the history of modern pop culture that parts of it have an authentic strangeness. There are a couple of lovely-looking sequences done in an early, two-step Technicolor process. One of them is, of course, the resurrection; the other is a morning-after scene that's a handy reminder that, once upon a time, DeMille did know how to stage an orgy, or the remains of one. (A bunch of ugly-looking, over-made-up guys are sitting around acting zonked while Mary Magdalene makes out with a leopard. "Mary," says the fatso on the guy's team, "would you kiss a beast and not kiss me?" This nameless wretch this achieves screen immortality as the inventer of leaving yourself wide open for whatever the woman says next. Compared to Ray's movie, it's pretty straight forward both in terms of its narrative and whatever you want to see there in terms of political subtext: Judas here is a looking-out-for-number-one kind of guy who has misread Jesus as a grafter on the rise and has hopped on for what he expects will be a ride on the gravy train. He starts to realize that he's misplayed his hand when he notices that Jesus only wants to waste his miraculous healing powers on the poor, occasioning a few title cards that make him look like a Republican senator inveighing against socialized medicine on C-SPAN at two in the morning. The title cards help. This material definitely plays better when you can't hear what the actors are supposed to be saying.
