It Was 50 Years Ago Today: ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’
March 3, 1965
The Greatest Story Ever Told
#1 film at the US box office, February 21 – March 6, 1965
The Bible has been a ready source of material for filmmakers since the dawn of cinema. After all, the Holy Book provides free, public domain material familiar to the vast majority of movie-going audiences. (Not to mention the fact that, under the rigid Motion Picture Production Code of the 1930s-’60s, filmmakers could get away with a level of violence, sex, and nudity in biblical films that wouldn’t otherwise pass muster.) The biblical epic reached its commercial zenith in the 1950s, with Quo Vadis (1951), The Ten Commandments (1956), and Ben-Hur (1959) matching hefty budgets with even heftier box office.
It wasn’t until the 1960s, however, that Hollywood got around to devoting a film to the life of the Nazarene, from birth to resurrection. The first attempt, 1961’s King of Kings, wasn’t much of a success. The second, however, had all the signs of being a blockbuster. It was directed by George Stevens, just coming off an Academy Award nomination for 1959’s The Diary of Anne Frank; it was based on a popular novel by Fulton Oursler, as well as the Bible; and its cast featured roughly half the population of Hollywood.
Unfortunately, however, The Greatest Story Ever Told is remembered less for its merits than its for its spectacular failure. At the time, it was the most expensive movie ever made in the United States. Even though it managed to top the box office for two weeks, it came nowhere near recouping its $20 million budget, equivalent to roughly $150 million in today’s money. (In comparison, the movie that succeeded it at the top of the box office, The Sound of Music, held the top spot for 12 non-consecutive weeks on a relatively modest $8.2 million budget.) The Greatest Story’s star power, epic scope, and perceived importance obliged the Academy to nominate it for five Oscars (albeit in no major categories), but it left the ceremony empty-handed, losing to Doctor Zhivago and, for Best Visual Effects, Thunderball. It also killed the career of George Stevens, one of the most popular directors in ‘50s Hollywood, who only directed one more picture afterward: the 1970 Elizabeth Taylor/Warren Beatty vehicle The Only Game in Town — also a flop.
Whatever The Greatest Story Ever Told’s shortcomings, however, much of its poor reputation seems due to negative hype that bedeviled it from the outset. The movie spent years in pre-production, racking up at least $2.3 million in expenses before a single frame had been shot. The production moved from 20th Century Fox to United Artists, then sat on the shelf for two years before it was finally released, in a bloated four-hour, 20-minute cut. (The current home video edition runs an hour shorter and still sprawls.) These backstage issues, when combined with its overweening pretensions — from its crawling, four-minute-long opening credits, to its heavy-handed use of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” to the uniformly somber tone, which aims for reverence but results in monotony — add up to a film that’s too big not to fail.
To be fair, The Greatest Story Ever Told is not an easy movie to love, as much of it seems precisely constructed to keep the audience at arm’s length. Stevens used wide angle shots to great effect in Westerns like Shane and Giant, where they gave a sense of the grandeur of the American southwest, but here they act to distance the viewer from the people and activities onscreen. The film also makes the odd choice not to illustrate Jesus’ more awe-inspiring (and photogenic) miracles, but instead merely has characters mentioning that they occurred. While some of this decision may be down to the level of special effects available at that time, it takes much of the wind out of the narrative to film people talking about Jesus walking on water or feeding the 5,000, rather than actually showing these events happen. Combine that with the casting of Hollywood newcomer Max von Sydow — a great Swedish actor, but too cerebral and internal to play someone with the world-shaking charisma of Jesus — and the result is a film without the spark or sense of personal connection that has drawn billions of people to Christianity.
One of the most infamous criticisms of The Greatest Story Ever Told is its casting. While Stevens specifically chose von Sydow because he was a blank canvas to most of the movie-going audience (who, presumably, wouldn’t recognize him as the knight playing chess with Death in The Seventh Seal, or as the revenge-killing father in The Virgin Spring), the director had no such compunction about the rest of the cast. Nearly every actor in the film is a star, or at least a recognizable face, from Charlton Heston as John the Baptist, to Telly Savalas as Pontius Pilate, to Robert Blake as Simon the Zealot. While this onslaught of cameos can get distracting (and surely contributed to the film’s inflationary budget), Stevens does occasionally manage to balance the gratuitous appearances with those that use the actor’s persona to the role’s advantage. For every John Wayne miscast as a Roman centurion (uttering the infamous line, “Truly, this man was the son of God” in his drunken-cowboy cadence), there’s the eternally righteous Sidney Poitier as Simon of Cyrene, the man who helped carry Jesus’ cross. The Greatest Story even manages to make room for one truly great performance: Donald Pleasence as “The Dark Hermit,” who plays Satan not as a cackling schemer, but as a more-or-less reasonable man with a vaguely malevolent core.
Yet for all its shortcomings, The Greatest Story Ever Told is not the travesty that its reputation suggests. Its biggest mistake may have been timing. The Greatest Story would be just one of many major studio flops in the mid-’60s, signalling that moviegoers’ tastes were changing away from lavish historical dramas toward the sort of lower-key, artsier fare that would comprise the New Hollywood movement of the late ‘60s and ‘70s. Biblical-based movies that followed tended to be smaller-scale, lower-budgeted musicals like Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell (both 1973), whose unknown actors, youthful casts, and hippie mindset seemed a direct rebuke to these kind of star-stuffed megaproductions. The next biblical epic to be a success wouldn’t come until 40 years later, with The Passion of the Christ in 2004. Two more recent hits, Noah and Exodus: Gods and Kings, hint at a possible revival of the biblical epic just around the corner. If so, perhaps now is the time for moviegoers to reconsider The Greatest Story Ever Told, to finally see if it stands up apart from its troubled history and bad reputation.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
