The last major Jesus-focused film of the silent cinema era was Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 release “The King of Kings.” The production offered heaping servings of DeMille’s vices and virtues as a filmmaker: an astonishing sense of visual spectacle and the uncanny ability to make an epic move at a swift pace, coupled with a bizarre sense of dramatic puerility laced with the obsessive need to improve upon holy source material with old-fashioned vulgarity.
DeMille had scored a major commercial success in 1923 with “The Ten Commandments,” which offered a diptych that matched the visually commanding epic tale of the Exodus against a modern morality play loaded with sex and violence. As a follow-up, the director/producer toyed with a film based on the Old Testament story of Noah but opted to switch to the New Testament when he discovered Warner Bros. was planning its own film about the Biblical deluge. Jeanie Macpherson, DeMille’s favorite screenwriter, was tasked with adapting the Gospels according to Cecil B. DeMille.
From the opening scenes, “The King of Kings” decides to jazz up the story with some Roaring Twenties sex appeal. If we are to embrace this retelling, we need to accept Mary Magdalene as a glamorous and wealthy courtesan who has the richest Roman and Judean men at her command. Mary’s palatial home includes muscular male attendants, a pet leopard and a wardrobe closer in style and spirit to the then-contemporary burlesque revues than the fashions of the Roman Empire.
But Mary is upset: her lover Judas Iscariot is spending more time with a mysterious carpenter who has become famous for miracle healings. Outraged at being dumped, Mary summons her zebra-borne chariot (a gift to her from a Nubian king) and drives off to reclaim Judas.
Rarely has a Biblical film taken so many zany liberties as this opening sequence in “The King of Kings,” but DeMille somehow manages to pull it off – and in fairness, DeMille avoids conflating
Mary Magdalene with the woman accused of adultery, who appears later in her own segment. The opening sequence was shot in the two-strip Technicolor process that gives Mary’s domain a brilliantly tawdry setting, and the dramatic seething of Jacqueline Logan as the spurned harlot is quite entertaining for all the wrong reasons.
But “The King of Kings” does not turn Jesus’ life into a boulevard farce, and the introduction of Jesus to the audience comes in a startling manner. A lame boy named Mark is healed by Jesus – the intertitles insist that the child grew up to write the Gospel According to Mark, another obvious anachronism. The boy brings a blind girl to Jesus’ presence – we know she is blind because she walks around with shut eyes and outstretched hands, complaining that she cannot see. But when her eyes finally open, the camera takes on her point of view to present Jesus for the first time.
DeMille cast English actor H.B. Warner as Jesus – at 50, Warner was somewhat too old for the role, but through expert make-up and DeMille’s direction, he brought a sense of mature wisdom to the character. The intellectual serenity in Warner’s interpretation is in striking contrast to the rest of the cast, who either seem to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown or are emoting with enough fury to fuel 10 silent films.
Mary Magdalene’s initial hostile confrontation with Jesus sets the stage for one of the most striking sequences ever captured in a DeMille film. Recognizing the cause of her sins, Jesus calmly but firmly evicts seven demons from her body. This was achieved in a brilliant special effects sequence involving multiple exposures, with the demons depicted as wretched women embodying each of the Seven Deadly Sins – another anachronism, admittedly, but one that fits in the context of the story. Warner’s Jesus is the calm amidst Logan’s emotional storm, and her transformation after the exorcism is a great feat of acting. Sadly, Mary Magdalene’s character mostly vanishes from this point in the story and only returns in the final scenes of the film.
There is another unexpected surprise sequence where DeMille gives Jesus a sense of playful nostalgia. While entering a carpenter’s shop, Jesus smiles in recollection of his pre-ministerial career and picks up the tools that were once part of his trade. He begins to smooth out the rough edges of a long wooden plank – the end of the plank is behind a curtain that Jesus initially does not notice. When the curtain is pulled back, Jesus discovers that He was smoothing down a giant cross that the carpenter had been contracted to make by the Romans.
But rather than go for the obvious and have Jesus do a double-take or worse, DeMille allows Warner’s Jesus to calmly stare at the cross, showing no outward signs of acquaintance to His fate.
The cross later returns in the sequence where Jesus is marched by His Roman captors to Calvary. Again, DeMille’s odd dichotomy of sublime and ridiculous is on display: the boy Mark watches Jesus drag the cross and begins to berate the powerfully-built Simon of Cyrene (played by William Boyd, the future Hopalong Cassidy) to volunteer to carry the cross for the scourged and exhausted Jesus. Simon steps forward when Jesus is unable to proceed with His labor and goes to lift the cross. But the cross is significantly heavier than Simon expected and he is not initially able to shoulder the burden. In surprise, he turns and views the thin and badly tortured Jesus, clearly baffled how someone who appears physically weak was able to drag the heavy cross for such a long period. With profound new respect for Jesus, Simon manages to raise the cross and complete Jesus’ trek to Calvary.
Nonetheless, DeMille’s bad instincts often get in the way. Prior to the Crucifixion, DeMille and his scenarist Macpherson turn Pilate’s judgment of Christ into a near-soap opera. Jesus’ time
before Herod Antipas is omitted, while Pilate’s rather sexy wife (identified in the intertitles as Claudia Procula, a name that is not in the New Testament) makes a full-throttle direct appeal for Jesus in front of all gathered, rather than sending a messenger with a note asking that He be spared. The high priest Caiaphas hovers around Pilate, sneering and manipulating him to pass fatal judgment against Jesus. And when the decree for Crucifixion is announced, Judas Iscariot comes running into the room and returns his pieces of silver to Caiaphas, grabbing the rope that was used to bind Jesus’ wrists and turning it into a noose for his own destruction.
DeMille and Macpherson opted to make Caiaphas the central villain of “The King of Kings,” and this is the biggest problem with the film. The make-up and costuming for Rudolph Schildkraut’s
interpretation of the villainous high priest pushed the proverbial envelope on Jewish stereotyping. The film also creates a new scene where Caiaphas reacts to an earthquake that followed the Crucifixion by pleading to God that he alone was responsible for Jesus’ death and that the guilt of the murder should not fall on the Jewish people. This aspect of “The King of Kings” brought more than a few critical comments from Jewish-American leaders, although DeMille vehemently insisted that his film was not anti-Semitic.
“Jewish editors and Rabbis in some instances have read anti-Semitic ideas into their interpretation of my picture because they are not acquainted with what the New Testament tells us,” DeMille said in a statement following negative criticism from Jewish leaders. “They have out of their own minds invented a hostility that does not exist. The danger now is that some Christian editor or other will say that the Jews’ reaction to ‘The King of Kings’ springs from a guilty conscience and consequently they will infer that if Jesus were alive today these Jews, I speak of would crucify him again. The very men who read prejudice into the picture are themselves storing up material for anti-Semitic propaganda. They are the ones who will be entirely responsible for any prejudice against the Jewish people. ‘The King of Kings’ does not in any manner encourage such prejudice. It tells the immortal story without any racial implications whatsoever and shows the Jews divided into opposing parties over the reforms urged by Jesus.”
However, DeMille agreed to edit the film to tone down the perceived stereotyping of Sanhedrin leadership when the film was being prepared for European distribution.
If DeMille was guilty of anything, it was being something of a cornball. In the Calvary sequence, he not only placed Jesus’ mother Mary at the foot of His cross, but also placed the grieving elderly mother of one of the crucified thieves, along with the agitated pet dog of the other thief, at the feet of their respective crosses. There is also an unsympathetic woman watching the three men die while eating popcorn – don’t ask how she managed to bring that Mexican snack to ancient Judea.
For the Resurrection, DeMille brought back the two-strip Technicolor from the opening sequence. But whereas DeMille used overheated color to emphasis the luxuriant sinfulness of the pre-cured Mary Magdalene, he also used the warmth and richness of the color cinematography to emphasis the power and serenity of the resurrected Jesus. The style employed in the ending of “The King of Kings” almost justifies the sometimes-baffling means that led up to the moving denouement.
The original 1927 road show presentation of “The King of Kings” ran for 155 minutes, but a 1928 general release version cut 40 minutes of footage and switched out the Technicolor version of the opening sequence for a black-and-white tableau. The shorter version was the one that was rereleased with a synchronized music score and sound effects in the 1930s and was broadcast for years on television. Fortunately, the 155-minute version was preserved and shown again in 2004 for a DVD release from The Criterion Collection.
(This article is excerpted from Phil Hall’s book “Jesus Christ Movie Star”)