A Bio Pic of Biblical Proportions

With a name like The Greatest Story Ever Told, your film pretty much has to be guaranteed good. Of course, with a cast as star-studded as this one, it was pretty hard for director George Stevens and writer Henry Denker to go wrong with their 1965 biblical epic. The film was based on a book of the same name by Fulton Oursler, who wrote several novels, plays, and short stories. The film chronicles the life of Jesus of Nazareth from birth until death.

The cast, as I mentioned before, is one of the greatest assemblages of acting talent in motion pictures. The leading role of Jesus was portray by Swedish actor Max von Sydow, an acclaimed actor who has done mostly foreign language films. Michael Anderson Jr. played John the Baptist, Carroll Baker as Veronica, Pat Boone as the Young Man at the Tomb, and Charlton Heston as St. John the Baptist. Mary and Joseph were respectively played by Dorothy McGuire and Robert Loggia. I won't name every single part, but the cast list continues on with such fine actors and actresses as Claude Rains, Martin Landau, Roddy McDowall, Sidney Poitier, Shelley Winters, Ed Wynn, John Wayne, Angela Lansbury, Van Heflin, Sal Mineo,Telly Savalas, Paul Stewart, Harold J. Stone, Joseph Schildkraut, Victor Buono, Jose Ferrer, Robert Blake, Donald Pleasence, Richard Conte, Jamie Farr, David McCallum, Ina Balin, Janet Margolin, and Cyril Delevanti. This film figures in at Christmastime not just because of the Jesus element but also because of his retrospective on faith and its meaning.

Darryl F. Zanuck was the one who acquired the rights for the film from Oursler, who was then a senior editor of Reader's Digest. Zanuck, as many of you know was working for Fox and now the film is in the hands of MGM. George Stevens at the time was directed the film version of The Diary of Anne Frank (which we'll get to on Hanukkah) and since the studio wasn't doing anything with the rights, decided he wanted to produce the epic of biblical proportions. The American southwest was chosen for many of the films locations, since Stevens wanted to give a dramatic look to the film he did not think he would find in the settings of the Middle East. The film took years to right and an estimated $20 million to make. Critics were divided when the film was released, though Stevens thought the film was a masterpiece.

You can watch the film divided up into short segments here thanks to YouTube and Google Video. MGM now owns the film and has a site for it with trailers, info, and still shots from the movie, which can be found here. Some wonderful screenshots from the film can be found at the Movie Screen Shot Blog and more info and a synopsis can be found here, thanks to Mahalo.com. You can read two reviews, one from The New York Times and another from soulfoodcinema.com. And if you want to see the film on your TV rather than your computer, Turner Classic Movies is running the film on Christmas Day, which you can read about here.