The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)

(On Cable TV, April 2022) If there’s one adjective that I don’t often use in talking about film, it’s “monumental” – but it fits unusually well in describing The Greatest Story Ever Told, a staggering three-hour-plus epic film tackling the biggest topic in Christianity: the story of Jesus, seemingly unabridged. Writer-director George Stevens spent years getting this film completed and was rewarded with five Academy Awards nominations for his efforts – and you’re going to feel every minute of the film’s production history, as it unhurriedly (even in the now-abridged version cut down from an original four-hour running time) paces through Jesus’ life in the most pedantic, obvious way. If you know about circa-1962ish Hollywood, one of the film’s attractions lies in spotting celebrity cameos, big and small (such as John Wayne’s infamous “Truly, he is the son of God”) from a star-studded cast of supporting characters. You don’t watch The Greatest Story Ever Told as much as you let it impose itself as the blandest take possible on the story of Jesus from birth to resurrection. If that feels like a backhanded document, it’s because it is: this thing is impossible to watch for fun. It’s too long, meandering, unfocused. It’s the epitome of the 1950s religious epic, and audiences at the time weren’t any more receptive to it than modern audiences: it flopped hard at the box office (enough to kill the religious epic genre) and got uniformly bored reviews. It shows up at Easter as a kind of station of the cross for viewers, but there’s a reason why it’s rarely trotted out at other times of the year. I might have seen it once or twice in Catholic grade school, projected in the auditorium around Easter time, but I would not be surprised to find out that it was the shorter King of Kings we saw instead. In any case – it’s a monumental film for all of the right and wrong reasons: it’s lavishly produced, deliberately paced and more readily admired than enjoyed. You don’t go to monuments to be entertained but rather to be impressed.