Word: jewish
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...Cecil B. De Mille, a preacher's son but with some Jewish ancestry, had scored a titanic hit with "The Ten Commandments" in 1923 - to its time, the top-grossing film after "The Birth of a Nation." Four years later, the extravagant auteur went from Old to New Testament. Another hit, thanks to De Mille's showmanship and expert marketing, and a color sequence for Easter Sunday, with Jesus surrounded by enough doves for a John Woo movie. "The King of Kings" played around the world for decades after it was released, until the proselytizing efforts of the Church...
...take a back seat to the hallowed story and processional pace. H.B. Warner's Jesus is in the gaunt El Greco mode; the scenes are essentially brisk illustrations of the Gospels. Nearly all the dialogue and narrative intertitles are from the Gospels. The exceptions: a few that mitigate supposed Jewish guilt for Jesus' death. Magdalene: "The High Priest speaketh not for the people." And a Pharisee, at the end: "Lord God Jehovah, visit not Thy wrath on Thy people Israel - I alone am guilty...
...children!" This is the phrase, implicitly condemning Jews for the murder of Christ, that Gibson said he removed from his film. (Turned out, he removed only the subtitle for the Aramaic translation of the curse.) We leave for another day the debate over whether a film is anti-Jewish if it repeats a line swathed in 18 to 20 centuries of Gospel tradition. Anyway, in the Pasolini film, with Italians chasing Italians, the curse seems one not of race or religion but of clan. Besides, Pasolini, a poet before he was a filmmaker, would be unlikely to excise a controversial...
...West End and Broadway musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice arrived on screen a few months after "Godspell." The first rock opera transferred to the stage, it was calcified in the made-in-Israel film version by Norman Jewison - who, if you're wondering, is not Jewish. Blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus (Ted Neely) faces off against a black Judas (Carl Anderson). The show had two hit songs, the anthem "Superstar" and the ballad "I Don't Know How to Love Him," but its theatricality got lost out there in the desert...
...Donning canonical robes, Hitchens found Gibson in violation of canon law. Hitchens declared that "He specifically rejects the findings of the Second Vatican Council," which absolved Jews of culpability in Jesus' death. But the Council "found" a lot of things; what Gibson disputed was not the resolution of the Jewish question but, for example, the abrupt shift in the Liturgy from Latin to the the faithful's own modern language. Another panelist, Newsweek's Jon Meacham, added the observation that "The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued pastoral guidelines about how believers should dramatize the Passion ... almost every...