When Hollywood Turns Holy Land
Skinner, R. Dana
OPINION will probably be sharply divided on the attempt of Cecil B. DeMille to put on the screen those episodes in the life of Christ which heretofore have been presented only by such...
...I am sure that Mr...
...After all, we can trace In the eyes or the mouth or the contour of face of reaUy great persons something that is reminiscent of the particular quality in them that has always appealed to us...
...DeMille's second great failure is in attempting to inject new drama into a simple story which no dramatist may ever hope to approach...
...DeMille has again failed through as sordid a catering to popular appeal as he could possibly have permitted himself in handling a theme such as this...
...Miss McPherson would also have it that the Crucifixion was brought about chiefly through the personal villainy of the high priest Caiaphas...
...There is no denying the pictorial grandeur of some of his scenes, nor the occasional sorrowful beauty of others, nor the sense of reality which pervades the picture whenever the Central Figure appears at a distance, surrounded by the symbolized love and hatred of humanity...
...To be sure, the reminders to which he is accustomed are static...
...WooUcott, "is the deathless story told without so much as a hint of the woeful understanding that Christ was crucified by the machinations of no mere ten, twent', thirt' villain, but by all the smugness and meanness and poltroonery that was in the Jerusalem of His time, just as ever since, in every land and every age...
...WooUcott gives the key to his own feeling in the closing words of his review when he says, "So potent is the human imagination when playing fondly with its tattered dolls, not all the sorcery of DeMille nor all the fortune at his command could make of H. B. Warner a figure half so illusive, half so full of wonder, as the streak of light that used to come' out of the wings in Ben-Hur...
...There are people—thousands of them—whose form of religious worship supplies them with none of the pictorial reminders which human nature seems to crave...
...OPINION will probably be sharply divided on the attempt of Cecil B. DeMille to put on the screen those episodes in the life of Christ which heretofore have been presented only by such earnest and devoted players as the Oberammergau group...
...Only the utterly unknown actor, trained and coached, If you will, for this one task as if It were his only life task, could allow us to forget for a moment the distinction between the man himself and the character he Is acting...
...DeMIUe has, I think, failed singularly to make use of the full opportunity which he set for himself...
...WooUcott's mental Image intact, something precious and sacred to himself, something undisturbed by details, gesture, make-up, or surroundings...
...DeMille could not have learned the simplest of all lessons from the Oberammergau Players in abandoning make-up ? Is it possible that in this whole country and with his immense resources he could not have found one man ready to approach this task with enough devotion to let his hair and beard grow as the Oberammergau Players do—an utterly unknown man who would recall nothing distracting from the past and give only the poignant illusion of the moment...
...How desperately these assumptions cheapen and minimize the whole tragedy of the Atonement I How curiously they narrow the application of a theme broader than mankind itself, to the limits of personal avarice...
...Even at the Passion Play of Oberammergau, as I witnessed it in 1910, where every safeguard that spiritual devotion can throw about a work is granted, there was a certain shock at the first spoken words of the man impersonating Christ...
...To the Catholic, then, whose power of forming mental images has received this constant training, and to those who, like Mr, WooUcott, have developed through the channels of art and creative criticism a similar faculty of imagination, the concrete detail of a presentation such as The King of Kings will do violence to a much more vivid and sacred mental image already existing...
...In close-ups, when Mr...
...Warner's beard stood out unmistakably as being glued to his face, or when his flowing hair became—a wig I Is it possible that Mr...
...WooUcott's to describe the results of having Miss Jeanie McPherson remodel the greatest epic of all times...
...We must, however, be fair to Mr...
...But Mr...
...Yet such a photograph is a thousand stages nearer to reality than any actor's impersonation...
...He is crucified afresh...
...Certainly there is not one that is planning a few moments later to bring before our eyes, in all reverence and humility, the image of Christ...
...To that extent the screen becomes, perhaps, a better medium than the stage for the presentation of a Passion Play...
...But in all those thousand other pictures, there is not one which, from the first, is knowingly and consciously leading up to a climax of sublime spiritual truth...
...Their true character, as they have revealed it to us in their work, will inevitably look out at us, even though masked, from their photograph...
...First of all, it was quite unnecessary to select a weU-known actor to represent the figure of Christ...
...Lack of that artistry for which even the humblest crave, lack of taste, and blindness to the power of the suggested rather than the seen—these glaring defects must be charged against Mrj DeMille's film...
...Here particularly I cannot find better words than Mr...
...Yet I do feel that in all fairness he is not taking quite enough account of the finer qualities of the picture itself, nor of the effect which it may have upon minds less sensitively attuned than his own, and less capable, because less imaginative, of summoning up a mental picture of the most Important events recorded in the world's history...
...One becomes absorbed in the movement of the drama, hardly hearing the words, and regarding it as a great and glowing pantomime hallowed by reverence...
...Indeed, The King of Kings made me just a little sick...
...WooUcott is not alone in confessing, "an utter Inability to forget for one moment that this was none other than the Jimmy Valentine of yesteryear, none other than our old friend H. B. Warner...
...He brings to his review, in this case, the benefit of a judgment based upon theatrical values in their broadest sense...
...And how vastly more true this is when we come to any representation of the Man of Sorrows...
...In the screen production of The King of Kings, one is spared, fortunately, the shock of spoken words...
...In a third way, Mr...
...WooUcott to wander from the by-paths of legitimate drama in New York in order to give us his impressions of motion pictures...
...Humanly speaking, it Is quite impossible to disassociate a known actor from his previous roles...
...But through the constant exercise of even the most primitive forms of meditation, he is accustomed to supplying, through his stimulated imagination, all the connecting episodes of this supreme event...
...Here," says Mr...
...Miss McPherson would have it that Judas Iscariot was a young and wealthy blade of Jerusalem and formerly a lover of Mary Magdalene, joining the Apostles solely in the hope of seeing Christ crowned the temporal ruler of the Jews and of becoming himself a sort of prime minister...
...There is no inherent reason why a motion picture of this subject should not be impressive and even awe-inspiring...
...I do not imply that the scenes themselves are any worse than those contained in a thousand other motion pictures dealing with worldfamous vampires...
...No matter what beauty may sweep through occasional scenes of The King of Kings, I, for one, can never forget those moments...
...But one may still hope that even these faults will not defeat whatever was sound and reverent in its purpose...
...I refer, of course, to the opening scenes of the film in which the early life of Mary Magdalene is dwelt upon in glorious detail, in a form which can be described only as Hollywood's idea of what Cleopatra must have been...
...This, if you will notice, is only another way of saying that the streak of light in BenHur left Mr...
...One cannot but admire him more for speaking out honestly...
...Yet even so, we dislike to have our mental Image disturbed...
...In time this shock passes off...
...Something In his gesture or look is sure to betray a whole series of previous impersonations...
...It is not difficult to pay full-hearted tribute to Alexander WooUcott for his review of this motion picture in which he said, "I found watching it a distinctly distasteful experience...
...It is rare, indeed, for Mr...
...They do not convey outwardly the motion and the sequence of drama...
...We all know the emotional shock we receive when seeing for the first time a photograph of some writer or other distinguished person whom we have hitherto idolized...
...The Catholic, accustomed as he Is to the Crucifix, the Stations of the Cross and the paintings which for generations have sprung from the devotion of the greatest artists, cannot well escape a constant and vivid mental picture of the Passion...
...It could, if properly handled, leave more of our mental image intact than the medium of the speaking stage...
...There are probably many people who will be caught up to a new realization of Christ the King through the instrumentality of this picture—simply because, wanting a better means, their imaginations have lost the vivid intimacy of His perpetual presence...
Vol. 6 • May 1927 • No. 1
