Day 37. December 1, 2006
Movement 3. Jesus Christs
Lecture 17. Jesus in the Age of Revolution: The Sixties (Part 3)
The commercial success of Ben Hur in 1959 prompted a remake of DeMille's successful silent life of Jesus, The King of Kings (1927). The 1961 version retitled King of Kings portrayed Jesus as a 'rebel with a cause' - the healer, teacher, and servant of Luke's Gospel. But three hours of tepid inaction held together largely through the narrative agency of a secular yet world weary Roman centurion named Lucius flopped commercially. In 1965 another attempt to bring the life of Jesus to the big screen produced The Greatest Story Ever Told, a screenplay based on a 1949 novel of the same name. Though it featured a long list of celebrity actors - for example, John Wayne as the centurion at the foot of the cross - the lukewarm public reaction to this long and ponderous production helped cut short the full-length cinematic lives of Jesus since then.