No, this is probably not (and surely isn't) the most reverential picture in its genre, but as an early entry in the 50s Biblical movie sweepstakes, there's a lot here to enjoy, led by its mix of religious themes with Hollywood escapism, including a tone that ranges from the respectful to outright swashbuckling. Richard Burton's performance is alternately competent or outright bonkers, crossing the line with occasional overacting that challenges Shatner's craziest passages on "Star Trek," while you also get the lovely Jean Simmons and a superb Alfred Newman score.
But more over, the film has something of a unique personality for its era -- the swift, 132-minute run time is positively tidy for its genre, and the story is always interesting and doesn't stop moving. Henry Koster deserves kudos for his direction (it's funny how the producers and the studio usually received more credit for films back in that era than directors), and then there's Jay Robinson's delightfully hammy performance as Caligula.
I'll try and get to a rewatch of DEMETRIUS AND THE GLADIATORS before Easter!
I've been reluctant to revisit "The Robe" in recent years because of my increased disenchantment with the fictional through-line in contrast to so many other films that did it better. If only the separate "flat' version had been released to offer a contrasting look at different takes etc. I would have been inclined to do it but the release instead gave us that worthless "picture in picture" thing I could never figure out how to use and which defeated the whole point. Why would it have been too much to just put the two different versions of the film on two discs?
I agree Eric. THE ROBE was one of those early format Blu-Rays that really was trying to sell you on the "advances of the medium" with special features that were quickly all but abandoned by studios -- like the picture-in-picture element and JAVA-enhanced material that ended up causing problems with some players. For that reason I think were nixed as time went on.
The menu on THE ROBE is easily the worst I've ever encountered on any Blu-Ray anywhere. Unresponsive to the point where you need to press a button and wait 5 seconds for the item to move to the intended spot.
I got my first film for the season in the other day because I wanted to get the "Old Testament" films for the season done before Palm Sunday,
The Bible (1966)
-I've always had a fondness for this film, which was the last of the classic big-spectacle Biblical films that began with "Samson And Delilah". To me it managed to depict the difficult parts of the first half of Genesis with well-done restraint. Probably the one moment where there was too much restraint I felt was in the Flood where we don't get a good view of the people shut out and left to drown. Huston settled for just two distant shots of people swarming that wasn't easy to make out. But the destruction of Sodom was to me done with an underlying eeriness that communicated well the debauchery and the air of pending destruction by Divine Judgment that the godawful Aldrich film of 1962 never came remotely close to achieving.
The weak link of the film for me is the sacrifice of Isaac when the film makes its one major deviation from Scriptural fidelity by having Abraham rail in protest at God's call to offer Isaac for sacrifice and then show him tormented during the journey as he takes Isaac through the ruins of Sodom. Scripture is quite clear that Abraham accepted God's call, likely because he knew that God would still keep His pledge to him which meant perhaps he expected Isaac to be raised immediately from the dead. That may not be an easy idea to convey cinematically, but it is important to understanding why God favored Abraham because he obeyed without question and not reluctantly. The scene is also not helped by the fact that the fire is clearly playing havoc with George C. Scott's age makeup. Scott's performance I'd note is a bit uneven. At times he has it right, other times not. There's also the unfortunate fact that behind the scenes during the filming he and Ava Gardner were carrying on and the relationship turned abusive thanks to Scott's drinking.
Despite the flaw it remains the best cinematic treatment of any part of the Genesis story for me. And it is I think appropriate for the season since of course the story of Man's creation and Fall sets the stage ultimately for the redemptive message of Easter.
This is the DVD of one of the musical productions of the Sight and Sound Theatre which is in Lancaster, PA (there is also one in Branson, MO). They put on Christian-based Biblical musical productions in an extravagant theater known for their use of elaborate sets and use of live animals. Many Biblical stories have come to life through the spectacle of their productions and having seen several shows in person, I can attest to how fascinating they are. The musical scores and book plots are not very exceptional (you won't as a general rule leave the place humming or remembering any of the songs) but it's the sincerity of the effort and the technical spectacle that makes these shows memorable. This production dramatizing the story of Noah uses a large number of trained live animals and the coordination is dead solid perfect. If you are ever in the vicinity of Lancaster, I recommend seeing a production as they are always on year round rotating one or two shows a year. But most of their productions have had DVD releases in professionally shot presentations and that's why it's possible to see what they do.
St. John The Exile (1986)
Dean Jones became born-again in the late 70s and that led him to doing this one man play in which he plays John the Apostle during the last years of his life in exile on the island of Patmos where he wrote the Book of Revelation. In convincing age makeup, he recalls the days of becoming a Disciple. A performance at a church in CA was taped for video release (with no less than Dan Curtis of "Winds of War"/"Dark Shadows" fame doing the TV direction) and despite the fact it's an old 80s video source is still impressive. Jones continued to do the one man show at various intervals in subsequent years.
THE BIBLE's Blu-Ray, even dating from 2011, still looks just exquisite. Even with a dash of DNR, this is still one of the best catalog transfers in the format -- even more surprising given how poor earlier home video releases were. I remember renting the old CBS/Fox laserdisc back when I was in high school and the transfer was so bad...they did a terrific job on the remaster.
Cinematically it is a gorgeous work as well. The audio is also active, though I find Huston's "Voice of God" echo-plexing to be too much. It reverberates to the point of occasionally being indecipherable -- I had to turn off the 5.1 mix and use the Blu-Ray's original 4-channel audio, where it's easier to hear and is anchored a little more to the center, which helps. A bit of an uneven film obviously like Eric wrote, but I like it, as the level of cinematic spectacle is high. Really good and underrated score also.
Also rewatched DEMETRIUS & THE GLADIATORS, which never surfaced again beyond the Twilight Time Blu-Ray release. The heavy criticized transfer needed reworking as it was an old HD master (and presumably may have not had better elements needed to strike a remaster), but it's still functional. I found the movie very entertaining as a ROBE sequel reprising many characters and Franz Waxman utilizing some of Alfred Newman's themes too -- though I wish Jay Robinson was more over the top as Caligula like he was in the first movie. Good stuff, even if it's less a "Biblical" genre film and more Saturday Matinee styled '50s adventure.
I too remember how awful the LD version of "The Bible" was. Not just the grain and the damaged picture image in the Garden of Eden sequence (where a line was visible for much of it) but the end music played over a black screen instead of showing us the credits!
"Demetrius" suffered from some of the same poor history that "The Robe" did not just in the history of early Christianity but Roman history as well (most scholars I know were probably laughing at the idea of a penitent Messalina promising to be a loyal wife to Claudius at the end). And I have to admit, I have never found Susan Hayward that appealing no matter how much I give her a chance. "The President's Lady" is about the only film of hers I saw that I liked her performance but in that one she had some good on-screen chemistry with Heston.
I had never seen this weirdo Robert Aldrich joint -- which really ISN'T suited to Easter (lol) and which ended up being released (after a long tenure on the shelf) after his "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" success. It's materialized in a German Blu-Ray mediabook in a solid if imperfect state (the end credits fade out before the music has finished), allowing one to soak in a highly flawed yet still entertaining Italian production with Stewart Granger as "Lot", Pier Angeli, Stanley Baker and Anouk Aimee. The "disaster movie finale" is pretty amusing (I loved the guy who throws his kids into the street before the building he's running into collapses on him!) and some of the action set-pieces are effective.
Obviously the story has been heavily sanitized outside a few moments -- and Maurice Binder's title sequence -- but it's not bad, the film invested in character drama with Ken Adam having designed the sets, all just before (like Binder) hitting it big with his involvement in "Dr. No."
The best thing about the movie is easily Miklos Rozsa's score. While it doesn't have the thematic quality of his other classics in the genre, it's a hard working, supportive score and his music for the end of the film is tremendous. I didn't buy the Tadlow recording but I noticed it's still available (like El Cid) through their website so I placed an order for them both as I assume the various "other greymarket CD releases" apparently have lousy sound quality. Certainly the score doesnt sound great in the film either, lacking the stereo majesty of BEN-HUR, EL CID, etc. and hampered by the poor Italian recording.
I'd pick up a US Blu-Ray if it were available for completeness but this is one of the bottom of the barrel titles in the genre exceeded only by the likes of "Salome" and "The Prodigal" for badness. Rozsa's score is the only redeeming point but even it's a case of something where he's been there and done that so much better. "The Bible" did the story better in five minutes than this one does that can't even give us token accuracy where they have Lot having the conversation with the Angels that Abraham did. Thankfully the film decided not to tell us what happened to Lot and his daughters afterwards which I know a present day telling wouldn't avoid doing just for the sake of it.
If it's still controlled by Fox in the US then it's never coming out here, but I can understand the rationale for passing lol. BTW the German disc IS region free and has a good audio essay by Glenn "DVD Savant" Erickson (plus a shorter Italian cut that at least doesn't fade out at the end).
-Felt it was necessary to see these back to back because they represent the two competing big budget takes on the life of Christ from the roadshow epic days. I have to say in the end that GSET wins more points for me for the fact it tries to build its story around the texts and does not resort to the kind of egregious fictionalizings that one finds in KOK (like having Pilate's wife be Caesar's daughter). Too often there is a sense that the life and ministry of Christ is being drowned out in KOK in this theme of rebellion against Roman authority with the role of the Jewish High Priests and *their* objections to Jesus minimized (though not wholly eliminated like in "The Robe"). While it was one thing to sacrifice perfect textual fidelity in a film like "Ben Hur", it doesn't work here and the fact that the film went through a good deal of post-production editing and reshooting (which resulted in the total elimination of a character played by Richard Johnson) speaks volumes to how they were struggling on this point. In the end, we have a gaping narrative in that the centurion character Lucius was clearly supposed to play some role in the sparing of the infant Jesus from the massacre, but this isn't visible in the final cut though a reference to it is left in when Lucius struggles to remember, "I seem to have favored your mother once before" when Jesus comes to visit John the Baptist (incidentally, the casting of Robert Ryan in this part is really a poor decision since Jesus and John were the same age, being cousins. Even though the family relationship isn't mentioned in GSET, at least Heston and Von Sydow are contemporaries).
-The score is great in KOK even if Rozsa is giving us a derivative version of his Ben-Hur masterpiece. But the film IMO fails to register as a truly authentic reflection of the story and why I can't rate it too highly. GSET as I mentioned tried to keep the focus on using the text to tell the story but unfortunately they failed to give us a cohesive film narrative like we saw a decade later with "Jesus of Nazareth". So KOK is perhaps while less successful as a Biblical narrative is I'll concede better as a filmic narrative.
-For the temptation sequence, I prefer GSET with Donald Pleasance's recurring "Dark Hermit" character. I'd like to say that whoever wrote in IMDB that Ray Milland provided the voice of the Devil in KOK I think was engaging in some silly speculation because whoever the voice is, it doesn't sound remotely like Milland. OTOH, I can recognize Vic Perrin's distinctive voice coming out of multiple European actors at various points along with John Stephenson as a Roman centurion ordering Simon of Cyrene to help carry the cross.
In the end both films have things to recommend but neither was able to be the definitive version of telling the story.
This sums up everything else I watched. No point to do review/summaries since I've done them many years running.
The Young Messiah (2016)
Passion Of The Christ (2004)
-Also for the first time in years listened to one of the commentary tracks, the "theological" one where Gibson is joined by two Catholic scholars. As an Evangelical Protestant I'm not in full agreement with all their points, but there are happily more areas of agreement than disagreement which made it worth listening to.
Ben-Hur (1959)
Jesus Of Nazareth (1977)
-I personally re-edited Part 4 to restore the missing scenes from the Shout Blu-Ray and even included an outtake of the risen Jesus first appearing to the Disciples.
Risen (2016)
I'm thinking this way of breaking out my personally recorded copy of the 1985 miniseries "A.D." which was a pseudo-follow-up to "Jesus of Nazareth." The miniseries has never reaired in its entirety or been released uncut on home video (a VHS copy by a Christian copy edited out many of the Roman subplots). It's time to see it again I think after a couple decades.
-As I indicated, I took out the 1985 miniseries "A.D." one of the very first things I ever recorded on a VCR when it ran March 31-April 4, 1985 on NBC. These were the days of the big miniseries that were "television events" and it ran 12 hours (9 hours 45 minutes with commercials cut). This was billed as the big follow-up to "Jesus of Nazareth" as it was done by the same production team of Producer Vincenzo Labella and Anthony Burgess doing the script once again. A number of actors from the earlier miniseries returned, though in different parts this time.
-In contrast to "Jesus Of Nazareth" which had a simplistic narrative of Christ's life as the focal point, "A.D." went for far greater complexity by showing us the early decades of Christianity and the parallel developments of Roman Imperial politics and how both developments came together. This required also giving us two underlying fictional narratives with characters who are meant to act as further linkages to the seemingly disparate tales of Peter, Paul and Rome.
-The end results manage to work but the complexity of the narrative compared to Jesus of Nazareth produces some uneven results overall. We get an all-star cast and some of them are inspired such as James Mason (his last role) as the Emperor Tiberius in his waning days, John McEnery as a thoroughly demented Caligula and Philip Sayer giving the best performance there has ever been as the Apostle Paul, surpassing even Anthony Hopkins. But at the same time we get some misfires such as Jack Warden with his NY accent as Tiberius's philosopher/aide Nerva, a totally wooden Jennifer O'Neil as Emperor Claudius's adulterous wife Messalina and Ben Vereen affecting a bad accent as the Ethiopian converted to Christianity from Acts, Chapter 8. As Peter, Denis Quiley is more Finlay Currie (albeit not as old) than James Farentino and comes off as merely adequate but one wishes a more powerful presence had filled the role.
-Another problem is that the fictional characters who link things together, a Jewish Zealot turned gladiator in the Roman arena (Cecil Humphreys), his sister sold into slavery by Pilate (Amanda Pays), the Roman centurion who falls in love with her (Neil Dickson), and finally the Roman woman who joins the Arena and falls in love with the Zealot (Diane Venora) don't seem to age at the same rate as everyone else. At least 30 years of history elapses overall in the telling of this story from the Resurrection to the Marytyrdom of Peter and Paul, yet it seems like Humphreys, Pays, Dickson and Venora are at most only 10 years older than how they seemed at the outset. We see a number of leaps in time that just isn't adequately explained other than the fact that we have to get to Nero and the fire and the persecution in the Arena at the end. This also results in the fact that some characters who are meant to be of the same generation are at times played by actors who are a generation apart. (Only in this production could we have a brief overlapping moment where Richard Kiley, as Claudius is in the same timeframe brother to Susan Sarandon's character!). Unlike JON which took greater care in the casting to prevent this sort of thing from cropping up, there is a distinct sloppiness in "A.D." that probably reveals the difference between having a director like Zeffirelli, and in this production having a journeyman, Stuart Cooper.
-Despite the flaws, this is much superior history to the post-Resurrection world depicted inaccurately in films like "The Robe" or lesser TV efforts like "Peter And Paul" which I saw last year. Despite it's length, "A.D." has some great moments and incredibly the series has never had a proper home video release (a VHS release for sale in Christian bookstores edited out most of the Roman scenes with their implied debaucheries, though this being a TV production nothing explicit is shown).
Last edited by Eric Paddon on Tue Apr 22, 2025 1:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
Agreed on A.D. Eric -- but count me a big fan nevertheless.
I want to add how infuriated I am by this series' poor representation on home video.
I bought the US DVD last year, only to find it was a heavily redacted cut of the series -- which excised I'd say about half of the entire production. Released by Gospel Communications, it also included a "study guide" (which requires Adobe Acrobat -- remember that app?). Basically the series was just whittled-down into a bible study tool, removing anything that wasn't suited to a "teachable moment".
I wound-up abandoning this (predictably confusing) edit of the series after about an hour, and just watched a Youtube upload someone put together -- which includes all of the footage (some of it taken from the original Italian broadcast which contained a few short scenes not in the English-language cuts).
It works well for the most part -- though the cuts between the NTSC and PAL footage ocassionally makes for an awkward shift in the key of the score (most evident in the opening titles)!
Nevertheless, wanting my own copy of the series, I wound-up tracking down the German DVD, which is also missing some footage, but is still far-more complete. None of the missing footage seems to be vital to the character development or overall narrative -- though it unfortunately does lack one of the most powerful scenes, when Caleb and Corina use their gladiatorial skills to rescue Christian children from the arena.
I want to add that Lalo Schifrin's score is one of his finest ever (and my personal favorite of his works) -- an uncharacteristically melodic and epic musical tapestry with a gorgeous main theme. Schifrin rarely got the opportunity to work on historic epics, and here he delivers in spades (it is a shame he hasn't been offered more such "broad canvases" in his his career).