Top 10 Jesus Films
As secular as Hollywood is, the entertainment industry recognizes the dramatic impact, and box office lure, in the story of Jesus. TIME scanned a century of Messiah movies and picked 10 to bring inspiration, or impudence, to this Holy Week.
From director Nicholas Ray, who had turned James Dean into a neurotic teen Jesus in Rebel Without a Cause came this biblio-pic with a Method tinge; humorist Arnold Roth dubbed it "Suddenly, Last Supper." As Jesus, Jeffrey Hunter, who played John Wayne's young partner in The Searchers five years earlier, has star quality to spare. In orange hair and what looks like portable Nativity-color underlighting, Hunter is such an erotic slab of beefcake, he turns every Messianic agony into an ecstasy. The film, though, has an antidramatic tone that the melodramatic music tries to vivify. Count on the pictorials to keep you awake; watching the movie is like having someone thumb, slooooowly, through a book of religious art history.
Read TIME's review of the film.
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