Cinema: The Dark Brother of Christ

• Share

Barabbas. A mysterious figure. The Gospels say only that he was a thief and a murderer condemned with Christ but released by Pilate when the mob, asked to choose which one should live, cried out: "Not this man but Barabbas!" The church fathers say little more. Yet if Christ died for any man he died for Barabbas. What is the meaning of this fateful and God-chosen criminal who gleams in the shadows of the Christian understanding?

In a novel published in the U.S. in 1951, the same year he won a Nobel Prize, Sweden's Pär Lagerkvist explored the question with spiritual insight and intellectual distinction. In the script for this film, which is based on the novel, Britain's Christopher Fry has both dramatized and deepened the novelist's reflections. With the result that Barabbas is a cinema curiosity almost as rare as a whale that spouts holy water: a full-color, widescreen, multimillion-dollar religious spectacle that is also, at many points, an intense and illuminating religious experience.

The film begins the story of Barabbas where the Bible lets it end. Flung from his cell by soldiers, the brutish criminal (Anthony Quinn) reels against the whipping post where Christ has just been scourged; when he rises to his feet his hands are covered with Christ's blood. Flung into the sunlight, he stands blinking at a young man in white robes; is it merely the unaccustomed light that dazzles his eyes, or does he really see a radiance streaming from the young man's face? As he stares, strangely moved, he stumbles against a big wooden cross, which almost falls on his back. Later Barabbas follows Christ to the Place of a Skull, where Christ dies the death that Barabbas, but for the grace of God, would surely have died instead. "Good," the brute mutters guiltily. "He's dead, the same as any other man. That's the end of it."

On the contrary, that is only the beginning of the passion of Barabbas, an agony not of hours but of years, a spiritual life and a ritual death that duplicate darkly the life and death of Christ. Like Christ, Barabbas goes into the wilderness; but whereas in the wilderness Christ came face to face with God, Barabbas turns away from him defiantly and resumes his wicked ways. Like Christ, he is brought to justice; but to his amazement he is once again delivered from death by the man who died that men might live. "A man who has been released by the people," the Roman judge announces, "cannot thereafter be given a capital sentence." Barabbas gasps. "I can't be killed! He died in my place! The death has been paid! He has taken my death!" The judge smiles a little, and consigns the defendant to a fate rather worse than death: the sulphur mines of Sicily.