Christ in Concrete

...George Stevens's direction is plodding and repetitious: Whenever he has what he thinks is a fine shot, he is sure to repeat it several times...

...Particularly striking is the lilies-of-the-field sequence, where, by superimposition, a field of multicolored flowers wiggles in the middle ground before a background of mighty mountains, and the whole thing looks like—may the Lord forgive me—a superimposition...

...Based on The Books of the Old and New Testaments, Other Ancient Writings, The Book 'The Greatest Story Ever Told' by Fulton Oursler, and Other Writings by Henry Denker...

...The stuff about rich men's difficulties in entering heaven, or the business of the money-lenders in the Temple— how painlessly it is all presented as if we had been given local anaesthesia first...

...Could these and their likes be what is covered by "Other Ancient Writings...

...No attempt is made to analyze Giuliana's evidently unhappy marriage, or her unsatisfactory relations with everyone around her, in short, how she got the way she is...

...here everything is sightly —even blood makes beautiful patterns on a white robe...

...The costumes try for coloristic effects—as when everyone is in white except the woman caught in adultery, who is dragged about in red, which, as everyone knows, is what adulteresses wear...

...And the color is so eloquent and thought-provoking that it emphasizes the vacuousness of what it envelops: plot, character, dialogue...

...As for pacing, the picture does not let you forget a single one of its four hours for a moment...

...but George Stevens, who made the film, can...

...The film is studded with "cameo performances" by guest stars...

...And the late Joseph Schildkraut injects a touch of Old Vienna into the deliberations of the Sanhedrin...

...When Newman's score is his own, it runs the gamut from saccharine to syrup, and is, quite simply, awful...

...What a seemly Crucifixion, what a relatively unlacerating ascent to Calvary, done without any other sound except that of Verdi's Requiem, the choir already foreshadowing Christ's triumph...

...How is man to adapt himself to all this...

...There's something terrible about reality," she complains, "and I don't know what—no one will tell me.'' Or, as she is about to go to bed with her lover, "Everything hurts: my hair, my eyes, throat, mouth...

...But what does it do for those whose religiosity, or English, is not redundant...

...The decor is almost without exception ugly and unreal, and if it suggests anything, it is previous decor...

...As the Hallelujah Chorus explodes around us stereophonically and stereotypically, it becomes clear that Lazarus was not so much raised from the tomb as blasted out of it...

...To be sure, this does provide a few moments of merriment, as when Shelley Winters packs into 10 seconds and one line, "I am cured...

...But it would seem that with this many tellers you don't tell a tale—you open a bank...

...And lo...

...even Pilate and the Romans have much to recommend them—there are good guys and a few bad guys everywhere...

...In his new film, Red Desert, Antonioni is no longer Michelangelo...

...Taking a hint from this, or from Eliot Elisofon, the color consultant, the photography aims for monochrome effects which are to create moods, but succeed only in looking stilted and garish...

...the apostles chuckle— it is all so pleasantly jocular...

...It is sheer nonsense...

...If the problem were examined in terms of a passably sane human being, it might be of interest...

...Miracles are kept down to a decent minimum—three —and to the kind which, with one exception, would not tax a Billy Graham overmuch...

...Later, when Christ is dead and Caiaphas announces, "The whole thing will be forgotten in one week," someone mutters, "I wonder '—a tidy bit of resurrection from Saint Joan...

...The chief theme of the picture is man's uneasiness in a world full of the splendors and miseries of technology: factories, houses, furniture, paintings, toys, everything has become mechanized, functional, geometrical, its colors coldly or dazzlingly challenging...

...Even the Lord's Prayer appears in the popular Protestant version...

...Besides setting race relations immeasurably ahead, this reminds us that the values of the film are, underneath all that orgiastic color, plain black and white...

...This beauty is stationary, painterly, and the arresting image precisely arrests and retards the already moribund thrust of the film...

...Bosley Crowther assures us that Stevens' "reverence should captivate the piously devout...

...his groupings are studiedly picturesque, and a sequence like Christ's temptation in the wilderness is ludicrous throughout...

...The photography is inspired mainly by Hallmark Cards, and, come Christmas, should supply us with the greatest cards ever sold...

...I am cured...

...He is here a daring colorist, fanatical mannerist, and inferior artist...

...Already the credits give us pause: "Screenplay by James Lee Barrett and George Stevens...

...Thus the film heightens the old Antonionian theme of alienation to the point of insanity...

...The principal performances are not quite so amusing, though Roddy Mc- Dowall's Matthew and Michael Anderson Jr.'s James the Younger are good for a snicker or two...

...even a foreman's cabin, crudely carpentered and gaudily painted, imitates pop...

...We begin with a starry sky in Ultra Panavision 70, the Star of Bethlehem, and an offscreen voice, not content with oil, throwing in myrrh and frankincense as well...

...It is not so much that the colors are used in an emotionally suggestive way (Giuliana and Corrado begin to make love in a walnut-paneled room but the consummation finds them among pastel pink walls...

...Even the slag heaps around the factories imitate junk art...

...Simon of Cyrene, who helps Christ carry the cross, is played by Sidney Poitier...

...Judas himself, though he looks shifty and behaves schizoidly, seems to love his Master...

...at best, he is Rosso—not as in Deserto rosso, but as in Rosso Fiorentino...

...Let us, in the spirit of Christian charity, refrain from commenting on the ancient writings of Fulton Oursler and Henry Denker, and the ancient creativity of Carl Sandburg...

...Here a robbery, there a rape, yonder a murder—all talcing place side by side along the main street, for Christ to look at, suffer, and do nothing about...

...The color and compositions in this film are magnificent...

...It is that the hues are chosen, juxtaposed and reproduced more beautifully than ever before on film, and that Antonioni's painter's eye turns almost every frame of the film into an arresting composition...

...But there already lies the first difficulty...

...at the same time it lowers the interest to that of a case history, and a far from clinically thorough one at that...

...appears blacker than it ever was before...

...Unlike Pasolini, who can make his Christ in The Gospel According to Matthew at least partly compelling through complexity, sternness, and a quality of fiery aliveness, Stevens gives us a milky, homogenized Jesus: No mention of his having come to bring the sword or to break up family ties, of barren fig trees or of anything else troubling...

...The whole conception is oh, so discreet, so defensively inoffensive...

...No, Sydow cannot be faulted...

...What else could you expect from someone whose mother is Dorothy McGuire, her age and expression beatifically identical at the manger and at the cross...

...She is continually huddling in corners, climbing up walls, trying to commit suicide, talking and acting in non sequiturs...

...after all, even The Greatest Story tried for such effects...

...an entire course in method acting...

...Or take the scene in which the evils of everyday life are depicted in newsreel style with grainy photography, absurd in cinerama and color...

...there is the music of Alfred Newman, which at climactic moments, such as the resurrection of Lazarus, falls back on the ancient writings of Georg Friedrich Handel...

...Evidently even the greatest story ever told cannot be trusted to bring in an audience unless a famous visage can be spotted peering out from under every third burnoose...

...Satan is shown merely as "The Dark Hermit," an unsavory fellow, to be sure, but nothing metaphysical—just a poor devil, really, and Donald Pleasence plays him exactly as he did Pinter's Caretaker...

...The whole "Produced in Creative Association with Carl Sandburg...

...His attire is blindingly white, and his face—could it be make-up...

...If this Christ says, "O ye men of little faith...

...But Giuliana, the heroine, is frenzied and paralyzed by turns, terrified of all, "streets, factories, people, colors —everything...

...Or when John Wayne, as the centurion in charge of the Crucifixion, drawls out of his helmet, "I believe this truly was the Son of God," in a tone to put the fear of the Lord into a saloonful of varmints...

...Pasolini gives us harrowing poverty, disease, pain and grief...

...There is the moment, too, when Christ, asked by the tax collector whether he has anything to declare, answers, "Only myself and my Father," which uncomfortably recalls Oscar Wilde's quip to the U. S. customs...

...There are some nice very long shots of figures milling around the mesas, canyons and deserts of our great Southwest, but whenever a set appears, even pseudo-authenticity ends...

...And the partial cure at the end rings even less convincing than Bergman's notorious conciliatory ending in Through a Glass Darkly...

...And, of course, the word "Jew" is never mentioned in an embarrassing context—if it is mentioned at all...

...This is not the fault of Max von Sydow, whose Christ is noble in bearing, beautifully spoken with a slight Swedish accent, and penetratingly handsome in a way that, despite the black wig, is 100 per cent Aryan...

...Here and there the scenarists and director surpass themselves...