![]() ![]() In Nicholas Ray: An American Journey by Bernard Eisenschitz, the director recalled, "we constructed what, according to my crew, was the longest track ever built, from the top of a hill to the bottom, with a track counterbalancing it on the opposite slope, the cables wound round a pair of olive trees, and we followed Jesus as he moved through the crowd, answering the questions he was asked." Unfortunately, Ray's creativity was often compromised by behind-the-scenes power struggles. It was shot in five days in Venta de Frascuelas (southeast of Madrid) using five cameras and 5,400 extras. Probably the most ambitious scene in the entire film is the Sermon on the Mount sequence. A genuinely global talent hunt garnered the remaining players who took on personas from the New Testament Robert Ryan as John the Baptist Rip Torn as Judas Hurd Hatfield as Pilate Harry Guardino as Barabbas Siobhan McKenna as Mary and Frank Thring as Herod. The last major hurdle was the casting of the protagonist, and Bronston turned to Jeffrey Hunter, the former juvenile lead whose all-American good looks were used to good effect by John Ford in The Searchers (1956) and The Last Hurrah (1958). While the director is more typically associated with intimate tales of isolated men ( Rebel Without a Cause (1955), In a Lonely Place (1950)), his facility with the widescreen camera and his understanding of its narrative possibilities ultimately proved to serve King of Kings well. Ray, who teamed with Bronston here and on 55 Days at Peking, did so in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to establish independence from the major studios. Bronston then made the somewhat surprising decision to hire Nicholas Ray to direct. In choosing a screenwriter, Bronston turned to his familiar collaborator Philip Yordan, whose resume included Broken Lance (1954), Johnny Guitar (1954) and The Harder They Fall (1956), as well as the aforementioned Bronston-produced sagas. While he would ultimately overextend his company, and be effectively out of business by the mid-'60s, Bronston had some of the most imposing cinema spectacles of the period to his credit, including El Cid (1961), 55 Days at Peking (1963) and Circus World (1964). DeMille's 1927 silent that had set the standard for depicting the story of Christ on film. With MGM's involvement for distribution, Bronston set his sights on an $8 million remake of Cecil B. ![]() At that point, he became a pioneer in the industry practice of locating epic-scale productions in Spain, and thereby ameliorating the massive costs involved. While he had set himself up as an independent producer by the mid-'40s, his achievements had been relatively undistinguished until the late '50s. The Rumanian-born Bronston first tied his career to the film industry in the early '40s, when he went to work at MGM's French unit after his graduation from the Sorbonne. Samuel Bronston, who had some of the most lavishly mounted film productions of the era to his credit, made his contribution to the cycle with King of Kings (1961), an impressive and thoughtful retelling of the life of Christ. ![]() Primarily attributable to the industry's desire to pull out all the stops in its battle with the new medium of television for the American public's leisure time, producers sought to render the world's most fundamentally known and revered stories on the grandest possible scale. For a brief span between the mid-'50s and the mid-'60s, the genre of the Biblical epic had a foothold in Hollywood unlike any other time before or since. ![]()
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