The King of Kings Details

Films that feature portrayals of Jesus Christ generally have a bad reputation. This is an exception, despite the idiotic hype that accompanied its production. Jeffrey Hunter, who plays Jesus, was forbidden to give interviews, his chest and armpits were shaved and the film was dubbed “I Was a Teenage Jesus” because Nicholas Ray had also directed James Dean in Rebel without a Cause. But King of Kings is a radical rendering of the Gospels — much more so than Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ — in which Jesus is almost an extra, his passive resistance seen as a less viable alternative to the violent revolution advocated by Barabbas. Executives at MGM were so alarmed by the early footage that they had Hunter re-record all his lines to make him more assertive and the ending was reshot in Malibu by another director. To compensate for some weak performances and for some lapses into high camp (notably Frank Thring's pouting Herod Antipas), there is Miklos Rozsa's marvellous score, Orson Welles's uncredited narration and the lavish design that one associates with producer Samuel Bronston, who also made El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire before he went bankrupt. As for Hunter, he never became a major star and died in 1969, aged 42, following a fall.

A patchy but frequently moving and pictorially effective work, ranging from the sublime (the first view of Jesus as a blind man regains his sight) to the ridiculous ('Harness my zebras, gift of the Nubian king!' says the Queen of Sheba in a sub-title).