Forget the incense

Lazarus was awakened from the dead last week in Utah. His tomb was a cave blasted into the side of a lofty butte. In 18DEG weather, flamethrowers sent balls of heat rolling over the flagstones in front of his nearby house so that the apostles could stand there barefoot without freezing to the rock. The apostles wore thermal underwear and sweat pants under their robes. Killing time, Martha of Bethany sat in the lap of the Apostle Philip while he read Friedrich Duerrenmatt's The Pledge and she read John Updike's Rabbit, Run.

All of this might have made an apt subject for contemplative derision had it not been for a solidly built man standing on a rock above the scene, wearing pale brown prescription glasses, a white lumber jacket, and a cowboy hat over hair that flew straight back like porcupine quills. This was George Stevens, beyond question the most respected and probably the most able director in the American film industry, whose reputation was assured by movies like A Place in the Sun and The Diary of Anne Frank. He is now risking it by betting that he can tell The Greatest Story Ever Told with such superior skill that audiences will quickly forget all the incense and nonsense of the traditional Hollywood Biblical epic.

Only Sprocket Holes. Stevens made Shane, too. deliberately including every major cliche of the oater: cattlemen v. sodbusters, gunfighters out of nowhere, a funeral, a Fourth of July party. Stevens found under each cliche its root truth as a primal element of life on the range, turning what could have been a routine buttermilker into one of the greatest westerns ever told.

Similarly, with a cast of dozens, he now wishes to achieve the definitive account of the life of Christ on film. There have been some 40 others. But, says Stevens, "it seems to me there's never been a picture made about religion. There has been more true religion in nonreligious films than in so-called religious ones. We are doing simply the story of Jesus, with no interruptions for theatrical embroideries. Our contacts are with ideas rather than spectacle. No Salome dance. In no way does it resemble any other religious film--except the sprocket holes."

Ungentle Love. Much of the script is by Poet Carl Sandburg. It is the result of four years' research by Sandburg, Stevens and others, exhaustively noting details of Biblical Palestine's season and weather, topography and political geography. Stevens carries around a huge black volume that contains seven major translations of the words of Jesus. He may try out three or four in a single scene to see which sounds best when spoken and recorded. The original script--Fulton Oursler's best-selling book--has long since been submerged and forgotten. Only its gaudy title remains, which Stevens stubbornly clings to for dubious reasons, even though it inevitably calls to mind all the spectacles he is trying to forget.

Charlton Heston plays John the Baptist and John Wayne a Roman centurion. Those are brief and minor roles, however. There are no superstars in the major parts. Sweden's Max von Sydow (pronounced See-dove), whose considerable talent has heretofore been confined largely to Ingmar Bergman films, is Christ. He has a crew cut and a short, stubbly beard. He wonders if he will ever be hired again after The Greatest Story Ever Told types him as the Son of God; but he worries more about his portrayal. He hopes to show "a new vision of Christ, a powerful man without the nursery kindness which Sunday schools perhaps tell you that he had. If love wants to create justice, it can't be gentle, and I think that is the way of love this Christ has to show. I think that's the kind of love Christ really preached. Love is not sentimental.''

Shake the Theater. For all the seriousness of the production--and to some degree because of it--the present location shooting has an inevitably funny side.

Jesus never smokes in front of the rest of the cast. A hired hand has been Cloroxing a rare white ass because it is not white enough for Jesus to ride into Jerusalem. The Holy City itself, with massive temples and twisting streets, now rises in the Utah desert. The apostles call it "Sardi's South." St. Matthew (Roddy MacDowall) has photographs of Elizabeth Taylor pasted all over the walls of his bungalow; he is proud of them because he took them himself while playing Octavian to Taylor's Cleopatra in Rome.

When Von Sydow stood beside the River Jordan (actually the rushing Colorado) and said the Lord's Prayer, members of the crew fell to their knees. "The Man upstairs is looking out for our company," says one truck driver, "since we're shooting this picture about one of His relatives. The only time it has rained or snowed was on Sunday, the non-shooting day." Stevens occasionally raises his arms and says: "Bless you all."

But when all the pious flacks ("I think Mr. Stevens goes to church every day") are back in their ginning pools and the potted olive trees have been trucked back to Los Angeles, it is just possible that what remains will be a superior movie. "Our theme--compassion and man's humanity to man--is desirable to men of all faiths," says George Stevens. I want to dramatize it so it will shake the theater.

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