Word: jesus
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...script by Anthony Burgess and top Italian filmwriter Suso Cecchi D'Amico ("Open City," "The Bicycle Thief," "Big Deal on Madonna Street," "The Leopard") makes clear the legal grounds for killing Jesus. Under Mosaic law, blasphemy ("I'm Yahweh") is a capital crime; under Roman law, calling yourself King of the Jews is treason. The writers' touch is especially careful and coherent in the trial scene. The Sanhedrin is no lynch mob; they are a group of elders searching for common ground, trying to understand a young rebel who gives them no quarter. ("I beg you, bring peace...
...Robert Powell, Zeffirelli found the Jesus of a million dining-room icons: agate-blue eyes, cheeks that didn't need to be sucked in for that dishy aesthetic look, a strength to match the facial sensitivity. For a while Powell had the lock on brainy charisma; he played Gustav Mahler, Henry Higgins, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Victor Frankenstein. After months on the Zeffirelli film, Powell said, "I hope Jesus Christ will be the last in my line of sensitive young men for quite a while...
...Zeffirelli stuffed his cast with stars of varying aptness: Laurence Olivier rolling his eyes as Nicodemus, Rod Steiger spuming as Pilate, Ernest Borgnine in the John Wayne role. Olivia Hussey, less than a decade after Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet," is Jesus' mother (another movie where the actors playing the son is older, here by seven years, than the actress playing his mother). Anne Bancroft is Magdalene - the casting director must have mixed up the two Marys...
...scourging lasts only eight or nine lashes, but they snap and sting; the soldiers wind up for their work like Olympic discus throwers. At Jesus' death there's no earthquake, only rain. Zeffirelli suggests that the response to a Savior's death would be the tears of angel, not the rumblings of subterranean spirits...
...What's changed in the quarter-century since I first saw this movie? Possibly my sense of humor. I didn't find "Life of Brian," at least the 30 min. Passion section, much fun this time. The sextet devoted way too much ribaldry to speech impediments and Jesus' termagant mum, and the filmmaking craft, which I'd remembered as spiffy, now looked slack. Only the strong central metaphor remains: of a fellow who is mistaken for Christ and crucified. "The Last Temptation of Christ" has a similar theme: a man slowly discovers...