Hollywood: Forget the incense

Lazarus was awakened from the dead last week in Utah. His tomb was a cave blasted into the side of a lofty butte. In 18° weather, flamethrowers sent balls of heat rolling over the flagstones in front of his nearby house so that the apostles could stand there barefoot without freezing to the rock. The apostles wore thermal underwear and sweat pants under their robes. Killing time, Martha of Bethany sat in the lap of the Apostle Philip while he read Friedrich Duerrenmatt's The Pledge and she read John Updike's Rabbit, Run.

All of this might have made an apt subject for contemplative derision had it not been for a solidly built man standing on a rock above the scene, wearing pale brown prescription glasses, a white lumber jacket, and a cowboy hat over hair that flew straight back like porcupine quills. This was George Stevens, beyond question the most respected and probably the most able director in the American film industry, whose reputation was assured by movies like A Place in the Sun and The Diary of Anne Frank. He is now risking it by betting that he can tell The Greatest Story Ever Told with such superior skill that audiences will quickly forget all the incense and nonsense of the traditional Hollywood Biblical epic.

Only Sprocket Holes. Stevens made Shane, too. deliberately including every major cliche of the oater: cattlemen v. sodbusters, gunfighters out of nowhere, a funeral, a Fourth of July party. Stevens found under each cliche its root truth as a primal element of life on the range, turning what could have been a routine buttermilker into one of the greatest westerns ever told.

Similarly, with a cast of dozens, he now wishes to achieve the definitive account of the life of Christ on film. There have been some 40 others. But, says Stevens, "it seems to me there's never been a picture made about religion. There has been more true religion in nonreligious films than in so-called religious ones. We are doing simply the story of Jesus, with no interruptions for theatrical embroideries. Our contacts are with ideas rather than spectacle. No Salome dance. In no way does it resemble any other religious film—except the sprocket holes."

Ungentle Love. Much of the script is by Poet Carl Sandburg. It is the result of four years' research by Sandburg, Stevens and others, exhaustively noting details of Biblical Palestine's season and weather, topography and political geography. Stevens carries around a huge black volume that contains seven major translations of the words of Jesus. He may try out three or four in a single scene to see which sounds best when spoken and recorded. The original script—Fulton Oursler's best-selling book—has long since been submerged and forgotten. Only its gaudy title remains, which Stevens stubbornly clings to for dubious reasons, even though it inevitably calls to mind all the spectacles he is trying to forget.