Calendar Christ

The Greatest Story Ever Told. "Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat," says the Bible (Matthew 7:13). The latest to go in thereat is Producer-Director George Stevens (Shane, The Diary of Anne Frank), lugging along blueprints for this unwieldy magnum opus on the life of Christ, a work begun some five years and $20 million ago under benign auspices. "In creative association" with Poet Carl Sandburg, Stevens and Co-Author James Lee Barrett begat a script based loosely on Fulton Oursler's bestseller, on the Old and New Testament, and on other writings ancient and modern. His goal, Stevens proclaimed, was to create a definitive biography, "a Biblical classic that has vigor in ideas--with no souped-up spectacles, no sword fights, no bacchanalian orgies."

Stevens has outdone himself by producing an austere Christian epic that offers few excitements of any kind. Its sole distinction lies in its contrast to those rambunctiously zealous camp meetings that Cecil B. DeMille used to patch together out of breastplates, flexed muscles and Persian rugs. Greatest Story is a lot less vulgar, though audiences are apt to be intimidated by its pretentious solemnity, which amounts to 3 hours and 41 minutes' worth of impeccable boredom. As for vigorous ideas, there are none that would seem new to a beginners' class in Bible study.

The story of Jesus unfolds, midrash, myths, Gospel and all, in a series of stately tableaux, each as literal and conventional as religious calendar art. In the first scene, the three Magi ride toward Bethlehem through a night drenched in blue. Of the miracles performed by Christ, Stevens offers easy-to-picture faith healing rather than such tricky feats as loaves and fishes and water-walking. Then he lets his whole drama turn on the raising of Lazarus from the dead, a much-debated episode that he underscores with the Gloria-in-excess of Handel's Messiah. Handel nonetheless seems an improvement over the sepulchral strains of Composer Alfred Newman's background meditations. The Last Supper, prior to the Crucifixion and Resurrection at Jerusalem, ludicrously borrows its table setting from Leonardo da Vinci in order not to disturb the public mind with a single fresh conception.

Swedish Actor Max von Sydow, who has appeared potent in the films of Ingmar Bergman, plays Christ vividly but all in one key. Though Von Sydow's brooding face can burn with El Greco agony, he seems little more than a cool, compassionate waxwork as he strides from Nazareth to Judea, recruiting disciples and saving souls with an unbroken flow of scriptural quotations.

His dialogue rings hollow set against the worldly diatribes of such lay villains as Herod Antipas (Jose Ferrer) and Pontius Pilate (Telly Savalas). "And he walked on water!" reports an aide. To which Pilate replies: "Get out!"

To give scope to Story, Director Stevens filmed it in Hollywood and in Glen Canyon, Utah. And he summoned unto him so many actors great and small that Galilee often seems but a stone's throw from Desilu. The long, long road to Calvary is lined with the usual yea-verily types (Claude Rains as Herod the Great, Charlton Heston as John the Baptist) plus, it would seem, any other celebrity ready to trade top billing for a chance to play holy charades. Jesus cures a cripple (Sal Mineo), a blind man (Ed Wynn) and a leper (Shelley Winters). He bears his cross under the stern eye of Roman Centurion John Wayne. Veronica is Carroll Baker, who mops his brow, and--in a labored salute to brotherhood--he gets a helping hand from Simon of Cyrene (Sidney Poitier). Such coy vignettes add star power but not stature. They merely bolster the evidence that Western man's greatest story has yet to be greatly told on film.

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