Alright Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my Messiah
Part III of the Celluloid Christ series
Note: for this film, I watched the 155 minute 1927 version of The King of Kings from the Criterion Collection’s DVD. It also has a 112 minute version from 1928. You can also find the film on YouTube.
In my previous entry on Olcott’s From the Manger to the Cross, I focused a lot on the question of “authenticity” and the various ways that film sought to be a more authentic portrayal of Christ. I closed by musing about “other creative interpretive choices” that I might see in upcoming films, and The King of Kings did not disappoint.
A challenge nearly any film adaptation of an existing text faces is how to adapt them. Does the dialogue stay the same? Does the film add to the events of the text, or delete, or re-arrange? How are actors selected to portray roles, and how closely will they hew visually to their textual descriptions? It seems rare that “book fans” are ever happy with the film or TV version of the story (and I say this as a Wheel of Time fan currently enduring Amazon’s Wheel of Time series).
And when a text has the significance, both historically and spiritually, of the Gospels, one can see how such adjustments are challenging.
Nonetheless, The King of Kings takes quite a few liberties with the Gospels. We are introduced to Mary Magdalene as a wealthy courtesan, complete with her own chariot drawn by zebras. We meet Mark the Evangelist as a young child, recently healed of his bum leg by Jesus. His miracle later leads a small girl to ask Jesus to heal the broken leg of her doll, which he fixes in a more traditional carpenter-like way. Following Christ’s resurrection, DeMille produces a new and quite touching scene where Jesus appears first to Mary his mother before going off to speak to Mary Magdalene.
The most striking and interesting example of this mode of interpretation is the story of Judas. To put it simply, while maintaining the overall trajectory of the life of Jesus, The King of Kings also re-arranges that story in order to make Judas a viewpoint character with his own story arc. He is first mentioned in connection with Mary Magdalene, who runs off to track down Jesus after wondering why her boyfriend Judas has not returned to her. On seeing this, I thought the film was setting up some sort of love triangle as an ultimate cause for Judas’ inevitable betrayal.
That would have been a new motivation, different from what is suggested in the Gospels. John 12:6 calls him a thief who held the money used for donations, while John 13:2 and Luke 22:3 indicate he was driven by Satan to betray Jesus. Some scholars suggest that Judas may have instead hoped that Jesus would overthrow the Roman occupiers of Judea, with Jesus’ rejection of that mission becoming the cause of Judas’ betrayal.
This latter approach is the one DeMille ultimately follows. When we first see Judas, well-dressed and well-coiffed, he is preaching about Jesus in the street. Despite his evangelizing, a title card tells us that Judas hopes Jesus kill someday be the king, a political sort of messiah, and that Judas will be rewarded with high position. DeMille later confirms Judas’ lack of authentic faith by showing him fail at exorcising a demon from a boy, and then connecting that failure (via title card) to the healing of the possessed boy in Matthew 17:14-20. Despite this, Judas remains with Jesus and the other apostles, and remains hopeful for his eventual reward.
The pivot point of Judas’ story arc occurs amid Jesus’ coming to Jerusalem, a sequence that DeMille significantly remixes from its Gospel origins. It begins with Jesus encounters the woman caught in adultery, who has been sent as a trap by Caiaphas to see how Jesus will judge. The scene creatively has Jesus escape the trap by writing sins in the sand, but the sins of those who would stone the woman. As each in turn sees himself named adulterer, murderer, etc, they surrender their stones and walk away.
Next Jesus overturns the tables and drives out the money changers from the temple, ultimately leading the crowd to wave their palm fronds and shout their Hosannahs for this man they wish to be king (Mark 11:9-11). Amid the excitement, Judas crafts a crown from someone’s fancy container and tries to give it to Jesus. However, he “passing through the midst of them” (Luke 4:30) when he realized they wanted to make him king (John 6:15).
Jesus, overwhelmed by the crowd’s continued chanting for him, seeks rest against a pillar. Who should sneak up to Jesus but Satan himself, offering him kingship of the world if only he would bow down to Satan (Matt 4:8-11). It is a striking scene, as the shot transforms the cheering crowd into an army in formation, banners waving, ready to fight on Jesus’ behalf. One can only imagine that, had Judas been able to see this vision too, he would have been elated by it. There is even a flutter of interest for Jesus, who ultimately shakes his head to snap out of it.
The vision dissipates, Satan slinks away, and Jesus returns to the crowd, holding a lamb (leftover from the animals driven from the Temple earlier). When he says “Do ye not yet understand? My Kingdom is not of this world!” (John 18:36) the cuts make it look like he is saying this directly to Judas, standing far off at a distance. Jesus then teaches the crowd the Lord’s prayer (Matt 6:9-15).
The impact of this remix on Judas is obvious: his hair is increasingly disheveled, he looks distraught, and he is confronted by Caiaphas: “Hearken, though King Maker! Thou shalt pay with thy life for this - and thy Master, and thy fellow knaves likewise!” Not long after, Judas accepts thirty pieces of silver from Caiaphas before returning to table with Jesus and the other apostles. Still unnerved, whether because Jesus is not who Judas thought he was, or perhaps because Judas is not who Judas thought he was, the betrayer is only able to mime taking the bread that is broken and given to him, bread the other disciples eat reverently. When the chalice comes to him, he cannot even take it, instead sneaking out of the room. Here he encounters Mary the mother of Jesus, and hides his face, stricken, as he heads off to complete his betrayal.
Scenes of Judas bringing the soldiers to arrest Jesus are intercut with the Agony in the Garden, culminating in Judas’ kiss. Yet even now Judas is not quite done following Jesus. When he returns his thirty pieces, he arrives after Jesus’ trial has been concluded. Jesus is untied in order to carry his cross, the rope casually tossed by a soldier to the feet of Judas. We next see him near enough to the crucifixion to be tormented by the sound of the hammer. As Christ is crucified, Judas begins to tie the rope to hang himself. His death comes shortly after Christ’s, and the earthquake and turbulent weather following Christ’s death ultimately collapses Judas and his tree back into the earth.
DeMille’s Gospel remix makes two important contributions to the Jesus film. First, it treats the people in the story as characters with motivations rather than pieces to be moved around. Of course Judas will betray Jesus, that is an essential part of the story, one that La Passion and From the Manger to the Cross did as well. But Judas’ betrayal makes sense, as much as sin can make sense, in the context of the narrative. Judas becomes for us a “viewpoint” character, someone who is not the main character in the story but rather our means of of entering into and engaging the main character.
This approach is perhaps best demonstrated when Jesus first appears, almost 20 minutes into the film. A young blind girl has been seeking Jesus to restore her vision. The young Mark with the healed leg leads the girl first to Mary, the mother of Jesus, who in turn leads her to Jesus. She tells him “Lord, I have never seen the flowers nor the light. Wilt Thou open mine eyes?” The film cuts to black, which is slowly cracked by rays of light. A halo forms, she grows excited by the light, before the halo resolves into the face of Jesus. Our first image of Jesus is quite literally this young girl’s first point of view.
Treating characters like Judas, the young girl, or other followers of Jesus as entry points for the audience is also a creative way of presenting Jesus. Instead of the viewers wrestling with making sense of the Word made flesh, dwelling among us, we get to do so through the other characters who encounter him. Amid these encounters, DeMille does an impressive job of balancing the competing expectations of a divine and human Jesus, who is both a bit aloof from and intimate with other characters. Visually, there is always a bit of a glow on and around him. His face is both stern and placid, loving and unyielding.
This portrayal presents a steady self-confidence in Jesus, assured in his knowledge of his mission and what it entails. This is briefly unsettled three times in the film: once in the temptation scene mentioned above and again in the Agony in the Garden scene, both of which draw on specific scriptures. However earlier in the film, DeMille invents a third. Shortly after the scene where Judas fails to exorcise a young boy, we see Jesus quite happily doing some carpentry work at the home of the boy’s father. A few scenes later, a curtain comes down, and Jesus sees that the wood he had been planing was part of a cross. Jesus is surprised, but the father explains the Romans pay him well to make crosses. Jesus ultimately stands resolute, hand on the cross, while looking across the way at a snacking and perplexed Judas. In each of these moments, Jesus struggles, briefly, before carrying on with his mission.
I think this points to DeMille’s second contribution via remixing, which is that it makes some of the themes of the Gospels emerge more clearly. In the sequence outlined above, the central claim that Jesus is the Messiah, along with the competing visions of what that Messiah-ship meant, is told through bringing together a wide range of different scriptural passages into a relatively tight series of scenes. The viewer understands that (a) Jesus’s Messiah-ship was not about a military liberation from Roman rule, (b) that some who followed Jesus likely misunderstood this, and (c) that some of Jesus’ opponents saw his potential kingship, whether military or spiritual, as a problem.
The success of this is tied to the improved character portrayal. We see the motivations of Judas, Mary Magdalene, Mark the Evangelist, Matthew the tax collector, and many other characters throughout. The most significant ones become the interrogators of major themes for us, the audience. When Caiaphas challenges Judas on whether he is ready to die for this Jesus, whose kingship is not what Judas hoped for, we are asked this question ourselves. Even though the great Gospel phrase “Who do you say I am” never appears in the film, it is the implicit question asked of each of his followers and of each of the film’s viewers.
To close, some of DeMille’s work on remixing the Gospels and deepening character development were connected to concerns about anti-Semitism. He actively denied accusations of anti-Semitism, which were present already during production and continued after its release. To stave these off, he portrayed Caiaphas as really the sole and central villain, with a small coterie of henchmen. The henchmen have little agency beyond doing what Caiaphas says, and Caiaphas is the one who prods Judas towards betrayal and masterminds paying Jews in Jerusalem to make false claims against Jesus. Even Caiaphas takes sole responsibility, praying during the earthquake that follows the crucifixion “Lord God Jehovah, visit not Thy wrath on Thy people Israel - I alone am guilty!” DeMille additionally made sure to include Jewish characters who refused to do Caiaphas bidding and who maintained the innocence of Jesus during his trial, even as they are shouted down by Caiaphas and his henchmen.
However, it’s still pretty easy to see where anti-Semitic tropes emerge in the portrayal of Caiaphas. When he is first introduced, the title card tell us that he “cared more for revenue than for religion - and saw in Jesus a menace to his rich profits from the Temple.” Later, during Jesus’ trial, Caiaphas is visually portrayed as practically a devil on Pilate’s shoulder, whispering “crucify him” and “we have no king but Caesar” into the prefect’s ear. Even his hat could be interpreted as almost having horns on it.
More has been written about anti-Semitism and The King of Kings by people far smarter than me, so I suggest checking them out if you want more. Suffice to say, it is a recurring concern in any portrayal of Jesus that is going to include the Pharisees, Caiaphas, the trial sequence, etc.
DeMille’s The King of Kings is the first of the films I’ve watched for this series that I genuinely enjoyed and that I would recommend to others. Silent films are probably off-putting for some, but the new score created by [xxx] for the Criterion Collection release is fantastic. The acting is often quite good, the staging is excellent, and DeMille had a real talent for spectacle that makes the film pretty engrossing. When I was telling my wife about it she said “you should have just done a podcast where you tell me about the movies instead,” and maybe she was right.
Stray thoughts about The King of Kings:
The invented relationship between Mary Magdalene and Judas is an interesting idea, but it never pays off in the film. She is clearly upset with him when she finds him and Jesus together, but this is about the only interaction they have in the whole film. Right after this, in one of the most cinematically impressive shots in the entire film, Jesus exorcises Mary’s seven demons, each corresponding to one of the seven deadly sins. Perhaps post-exorcism she no longer thought of Judas, but it is a little strange the inciting plotline of the film is simply dropped.
One thing I found fascinating about the sole temptation scene is that while it is the last temptation in Matthew - worship Satan for the kingdoms of the world - its setting is the Temple, which is where Matthew’s second temptation (and Luke’s last temptation) take place.
The film is famous for having two scenes shot in technicolor with the rest in black and white. The first is the opening sequence with Mary Magdalene, and the second is the Resurrection. The first one is visually striking, but it’s not clear thematically why it’s in color. The second is also visually striking, and it is clear why it’s in color. However, once Jesus returns to the disciples post-Resurrection, we are back to black and white, which is a jarring move on DeMille’s part.
The film is also famous for the earthquake and storm that follow the crucifixion, and it is genuinely impressive in its bombast and fury.
There is a touching moment where the unrepentant thief’s mother comes to the foot of his cross. The soldiers try to drive her away, but Mary, who stands at the foot of her own son’s cross, comforts her.
This is the last film in the “Early Films about Jesus” section of this series, so I’ll take next week off before returning with Nicholas Ray’s 1961 film King of Kings.