On the Big Screen: SILENCE (2016)

Martin Scorsese has made films about Jesus Christ and the Dalai Lama. Silence, adapted from a novel by the Japanese Catholic Shusaku Endo, sometimes seems like an attempt to reconcile or synthesize Christianity and Buddhism in the historical context of the persecution of Christians by Buddhists in Tokugawa Japan. Two young Jesuit priests, Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garupe (Adam Driver) sneak into Japan to investigate reports that one of the last remaining priests, Fr. Ferrera (Liam Neeson) has apostasized, renouncing the faith. They minister to underground congregations who revere "Deus" and cherish any material artifact of faith, from crude tiny crucifixes to rosary beads. These people face terrible torture and certain death if their faith is discovered and they refuse to recant by trampling icons. The priests are in constant danger from betrayal, especially from the man who ferried them to Japan, Kichijiro (Yosuke Kobozuka), an abject character whose family was slaughtered despite his apostasy. Kichijiro in many ways is the worst sort of Christian, one who wallows in his weakness just so he can confess it, yet we will see that his faith is in some sense the strongest of all. Ultimately it is Rodrigues whose faith faces the sternest test after Kichijiro betrays him into the hands of Inoue (Issey Ogata), ironically designated an "Inquisitor." Inoue sees Christianity as the foot in the door for unwanted European influence in his country, and claims that it may be "true" elsewhere but not in Japan. He respects the power of symbolism, telling Christians that they don't have to sincerely recant so long as they go through the motions he hopes will demoralize others by undermining respect for the clergy and their sacred symbols. One can also see an ideological threat to the shogunate, at least as seen by a Japanese believer and a Catholic filmmaker, in the Christian insistence on the value of every human life, while Japan's feudal culture -- as shown in many a Japanese film -- holds much life worthless. You can understand the preference for a Buddhism that aspires to the nullification of self and implicitly acquiesces in feudal tyranny, as well as the significance of the apparent conversion of Fr. Ferrera to Buddhism. He claims to be convinced that real Christianity can get nowhere in the "swamp" of Japan, and tries to convince Rodrigues that keeping the faith is worse than futile. He employs moral blackmail, holding Rodrigues responsible for the torture that the audience more likely will blame on Japan's vicious rulers. But if unassailable power holds innocent lives hostage against the priest's apostasy, Ferrera claims they'll be sacrificed to Rodrigues's pride. Through his ordeal, Rodriguez aches for divine guidance, but the film's title tells you what he gets until the climax.

Apart from a couple of pretentious shots early on, this is a relatively austere film for Scorsese, and that may explain why some reviewers find its length oppressive. It's also unavoidably an intellectual if not theological film, for all the gruesome poignancy of the tortures inflicted on Japanese Christians, and for that reason Silence has probably lost some reviewers' attention. One particularly philistine pan asks why everyone makes a big deal about trampling icons, but this issue really is -- pun intended, I guess -- the crux of the film. Ultimately Scorsese and co-writer Jay Cocks, if not Endo before them, are critiquing a materialist element of Christianity that arguably can be done without. Investing these symbols with such crucial significance leaves the faith vulnerable to the sort of hostile iconoclasm Inoue practices. Rodrigues's initial dismay at the Japanese Christians' devotion to symbols proves the right instinct, and while we see that Christians ultimately can't do entirely without such symbols, it looks like the key to the survival of Christian people is their readiness to sacrifice symbols, on the understanding that the symbols aren't the faith itself. The less Christianity takes the form of idolatry, the less vulnerable it is to Inoue's sort of propaganda. It's an oddly Protestant note to sound as an important theme of a Catholic story, but there it is.

If Silence convinces people of anything, it's that Andrew Garfield still has a future in movies after the Amazing Spider-Man debacle, though Hacksaw Ridge may already have convinced some people. The film ends up on his shoulders and he bears it well. I was even more impressed by the Japanese performing in English. Kobozuka goes all out as Kichijiro, giving the story's Judas a pathetic grandiosity that might remind you of Akira Kurosawa in his more Dostoevskian moods. Issey Ogata gives an eccentrically gnomic performance as the Japanese inquisitor (credit is also due to Tadanobu Asano, more fluent than ever, as his slick interpreter) both verbally and physically creepy. There's a moment where Rodrigues seems to have the upper hand in a debate when Inoue seems to deflate in stages before our eyes; the only missing effect is the steam coming out of his ears. He makes a great villain, though Neeson, in a smaller role than his billing suggests, is arguably more effective the sort of devil's advocate the story really needs. It looks like the film will prove a flop at the box-office, and that makes me wonder why Paramount didn't promote Silence more to the apparently growing audience for religious pictures. It certainly would strike a chord with those Christians who for whatever reason feel persecuted today, but perhaps the film is too specifically Catholic for the faith-based audience here, and maybe some still hold the allegedly sacrilegious Last Temptation of Christ against Scorsese. That'd be unfortunate, since Silence is really a more effective Christian film than that earlier effort. It's still far from Scorsese's best, but it's one of the better pictures of 2016.

DVR Diary: EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS (2014)

 

The Ten Commandments is corny. Everybody knows that. Cecil B. DeMille cheapened the Bible story with melodrama and bad dialogue, but what else could he do? It fell to Ridley Scott, who had already tried to outdo DeMille in Kingdom of Heaven, and a team of writers, to show how the Exodus story could be dramatized -- for there seems to be agreement that the Old Testament narrative can't stand on film on its own -- without old-timey melodrama and corniness. But nearly every step Exodus takes to differentiate itself proves the old-timer's wisdom. C.B. knew your main story was the showdown between Moses and Pharaoh (popularly understood to be Rameses II). Scott agrees, and both directors understood that the conflict can't come down to the two men making speeches at each other. DeMille juices up the conflict by making the antagonists rivals for the same woman. That, presumably, was an element deemed too corny for our time, so instead Scott's writers give us a failed bromance, more like Ben-Hur and Messala than Moses and Pharaoh. Their bro-dom falls apart when Moses (Christian Bale) saves the life of Rameses (Joel Edgerton) during a battle with the Hittites, in apparent fulfillment of a prophecy that makes Moses a potential nemesis for the future Pharaoh. Moses, despite being brought up as a prince of Egypt, is a skeptic toward omens and prophecies, but while Rameses claims to share that skepticism he can't help feelings suspicious. His suspicions magnify when Moses goes on an inspection tour of the city being built with Hebrew slave labor. The prince and general is just as dismissive toward the Hebrew god, but the Hebrew elders (led by Ben Kingsley) have a surprise for him. Apparently the elders have known all along that Moses is one of their own, saved from a proscribed massacre of Hebrew firstborn by his older sister. You might not have realized that Sister Miriam herself was taken into Bythia's household, where she must keep her religion a secret. Anyway, Moses claims not to believe the elders' story, but he promptly begins acting stupid. Having traveled to their quarters incognito, he's accosted by two Egyptian guards who mistake him for a slave. The smart play would have been for our hero to reveal himself as Prince Moses and have the guards back off. Instead, since the Bible says he has to kill an Egyptian, he kills the two guards as two bums watch. They inform the governor, who resents the pressure Moses has put on him and reports the incident to Rameses, who has just become Pharaoh after the death of his father Seti (John Turturro). Rameses puts Miriam to an ordeal to get the truth out of her, while she lies at the risk of losing her arm. Now here Moses might want to intervene because he's a compassionate, progressive guy. He could stop Rameses with a protest that his methods are barbaric, but instead he stops the ordeal by confessing a truth that we weren't sure he even believed. Rameses now has no choice but to exile Moses to the desert, though he does leave his old friend with means to defend himself from assassins sent by the wicked queen mother (Sigourney Weaver).

The story proceeds as usual with Moses starting a family in the land of Midian until his curiosity sends him up the holy mountain. Scott has the mountain resist his advance with a mudslide, after which Moses meets his hotheaded young sidekick, God. The filmmakers try to fudge whether this willful brat (Isaac Andrews) is God himself or just some messenger, but he plays the role God usually takes in the story. Exodus imagines the deity rather like the kid in the Twilight Zone episode, aching for an opportunity to put the whole land of Egypt in the cornfield. Understandably, Moses grows increasingly annoyed with this bloodthirsty little rascal, and we're to understand that his attitude is appropriate as a representative of a people whose name means to wrestle with God.  It really seems appropriate to an age when it isn't cool to prostrate oneself to the great I Am, much less take your sandals off in his ground-sanctifying presence. And Moses above all must remain cool, even if his methods prove inappropriate for the divine purpose. Much as Ben-Hur in the novel and the original silent film organizes an armed uprising to liberate the captive Jesus, so Moses initially sets out to liberate the Hebrews through guerrilla warfare. His first raid looks like quite a success, but Rameses responds with Nazi-style reprisals, after we've seen a Shoah-esque burning of the daily slave casualties, ordering one family hanged daily until the enemy surrenders, while the Pharaoh harangues his subjects from a podium (as played by the pudgy, bald Edgerton) like an ancient Mussolini. So whatever damage Moses and his secret army are doing to Egypt, it rebounds on his own people. The film seems to be making a statement about the futility of violence as a means of liberation, but the force of the message is somewhat lost as God basically says, "Step aside, Butch," and makes with the plagues. Divine terror does its work as usual, and as usual Pharaoh's heart hardens after letting those people go, and I think you can take it from there....

Exodus makes two fatal mistakes in humanizing Moses and minimizing Pharaoh. Tim Burton was on to something, I think, when he remarked in an interview that he found Charlton Heston terrifying once Moses came down from the mountain in the DeMille film. The eerie power Heston has in the second half of that picture comes from the certainty the character has and the certainty the filmmakers have about the character. Modern audiences are thought to distrust certainty, however, and while an uncertain Moses isn't entirely alien to Scripture, Exodus predictably overdoes it by having Moses bicker constantly with his little snot of a god and fall out with his wife over his mission to Egypt. Like many serious-minded modern films Exodus seems more concerned with how its hero feels or thinks than with what he does; it wants us to empathize with Moses in a way DeMille could not have cared less about. While Bale probably does as well as he could with almost hopeless material, Edgerton is a disaster as Rameses. DeMille realized that Pharaoh had to be a mighty man to defy both Moses and God, and Yul Brynner awesomely filled the bill. Perversely, Scott and his writers envision Rameses as an emotional if not mental weakling who seems to be in over his head from the beginning and compensates with petulant posturing. There may be an implicit indictment of rulers who claim godhood or demand worship from their people, but when Edgerton rants about being "the god" it sounds like a childish tantrum rather than blasphemy. Any movie of the Exodus story needs to be a clash of titanic personalities, but Scott's Exodus botches both. The picture looks good if overproduced in that tiresome CGI way, lacking that genuine "ta-daa!" quality of DeMille's best set pieces. There's nothing as horrifically bad in Exodus as some of the bad acting, from Anne Baxter to extras, in Ten Commandments, but nothing in the new film rises to the level of the old film's magic. That may be because ultimately Exodus has no faith in itself or its story. I'm not saying you have to be a true believer, Jew, Christian or Muslim, to tell this myth right, but if you're going to tell it you've got to commit to it on its own terms, or else what's the point? So now Scott and DeMille are even. Scott easily outclassed the old man by making probably the best Crusades movie ever, but they'll probably still be playing DeMille's Moses movie on TV every Passover long after Exodus is justly forgotten.

DAY OF THE SIEGE (2012)

In the U.S. Renzo Martinelli's would-be epic has the title of a generic war film. That probably infuriated a director who opened the film with a quote from 20th century French historian (and victim of the Nazis) Marc Bloch: "Misunderstanding of the present grows fatally from ignorance of the past." In Martinelli's home country, Day of the Siege is known as 11 Settembre 1683. On that day, the siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Turks was broken by an attack by a Polish army led by King Jan Sobieski. Martinelli's Italo-Polish production credits this rescue of Christendom from the last great Islamic military assault to date to the Polish king (played by director Jerzy Skolimowski) and an Italian friar, Marco d'Aviano (F. Murray Abraham), who was the spiritual adviser to the Emperor of Austria. The Poles, presumably having less of an agenda, or more likely seeing an existential threat coming from a different direction, call this movie The Battle of Vienna. For Martinelli and his writers, however, the immediate agenda is Islamophobic, though their hackneyed commitment to the conventions of historical drama, and perhaps a degree of good taste, make the film less of a hatefest than it could have been.

In 1683 Islam was on the march again, the Turks' ultimate goal being to turn St. Peter's in Rome into a mosque. The Sultan entrusts his grand vizier Kara Mustafa (Enrico Lo Verso) to take the Hapsburg capital. Friar Marco, first seen in Venice almost reluctantly healing the blind, goes to Vienna to stiffen Austrian resolve and convince the haughty Hapsburgs to accept the aid of the Poles and their upstart King, whom the Austrians see as a social inferior. With the Poles finally on board Sobieski insures ultimate Christian victory by defying Kara Mustafa's expectation and dragging artillery up a steep mountain to a commanding position from which he can soften up the Turkish position before scattering it with the cavalry charge of his dreaded winged hussars.

 

Above: a Muslim's nightmare vision of a Christian army.

Below: the badass reality of the winged hussars

Martinelli -- last noticed here as the auteur of the boxing biopic Carnera: The Walking Mountain -- felt it necessary to add human interest to this epic subject. He does this in two ways. First, his writers invent a sort of relationship between Friar Marco and Kara Mustafa in order to justify a meeting between his two main characters. When they were young men, Kara Mustafa while visiting Venice saved Marco's life from a falling piece of ship's cargo. As the Ottoman army nears Vienna and the two men become aware of each other's role, each grows curious to meet the other, but their fictional showdown is necessarily anticlimactic since it can't change the course of history. Meanwhile, a subplot focuses on an interfaith couple in a village Marco visits. The husband is a Muslim, the wife a Christian mute. As news of the Turkish invasion spreads, the villagers want to lynch Abul (Greek actor Yorgo Voyagis), but Marco intervenes to save him. He is repaid by Abul's flight to the Turkish lines, where he advises Kara Mustafa about the holy man on the Christian side. Later, after the invaders sack the village, Abul's wife is taken prisoner. He ignores her squawking, grunting pleas for rescue and allows her to be herded into a stockade with other women, presumably to be used for sex or sold as slaves, but he returns at night to arrange for her release. Later still, he appears at the gate of Vienna to urge the Austrians to save their bodies and souls by surrendering, converting to Islam or paying the tax required of People of the Book. Abul's story ends when, with the Turkish army in retreat, he covers Kara Mustafa's escape by putting on the vizier's armor and charging the Polish cavalry single-handedly. His pregnant wife is left weeping over his bullet-riddled corpse. This little story ends tragically, it seems, solely because Abul is a Muslim and Muslims can't change their stripes. Martinelli seems to want it both ways, catering to liberals by having Marco save Abul from a lynching, yet pandering to Islamophobia by showing that Abul couldn't be trusted after all. That's a provocatively mixed message to send to audiences in Europe, where anxiety about Muslims in their midst is much greater than it is in the U.S.

For what it's worth, the screenwriters take the position that Muslims worship a different God than Christians. This would be news to Muslims, who believe themselves the most authentic acolytes of the God of Abraham; their idea is that Islam is the default religion of that God from which Jews, despite Moses, and Christians, despite Jesus, have deviated in dangerous if not damning ways. Many Christians believe, however, that if Islam can't imagine God having a son, or if it insufficiently emphasizes loving fatherhood as a defining divine attribute, then Allah may as well be a fictional character Muhammad invented. That point aside, the script tries to score more points against Islam by having Friar Marco argue that "the one true God" does not demand submission -- which literally defines Islam -- but wants men to be free. That in turn would be news to countless people who've lived in Christian countries under the dominance of various Christian churches, but to be fair that's another story for other films. For now it's enough to note that despite some sketchy efforts to humanize the important Muslim characters (Kara Mustafa is shown as a doting father, for instance), Day of the Siege is indisputably an Islamophobic film, though not grotesquely so. You can't argue that any film showing Christians fighting Muslims is Islamophobic because I'll throw Kingdom of Heaven at you to stop that argument. What makes Day Islamophobic is its constant implication that permanent peace with Islam is impossible. There's no other way to interpret the Marc Bloch epigraph, while Kara Mustafa in the story warns Friar Marco that defeating Islam before Vienna would only be "trimming the Prophet's beard," i.e. a temporary setback. Don't get me wrong; there's plenty to object to about Islam, and more still about Islamism, but Day of the Siege strays into "all Muslims are a threat" territory, where we shouldn't really want or need to go no matter what our beefs are with specific Muslim goons today.

The film's Islamophobia could be redeemed if it inspired some epic action, but Martinelli's reach exceeds the grasp of his international budget. He can compose some impressive images on a relatively intimate scale, but the battle scenes upon which the film presumably depends constantly betray limitations on budget, technology and imagination. Martinelli has to rely on CGI reinforcements to supplement his extras. Worse, he resorts to CGI explosions and musketry along with repetitive, too-familiar shots of stuntmen flinging themselves from explosions. It may be unfair to bring up Kingdom of Heaven again, but that underrated picture has perhaps the best portrayal of siege warfare ever, while the battle scenes in Day of the Siege are actually some of the dullest parts of the film. Bad acting also undermines the picture. It was reportedly shot in English, but that appears to have left everyone (who wasn't dubbed afterward, that is) except Abraham at a disadvantage. Predictably enough, he alone brings any passion or power to his role, and if anything he might have shot for over-the-top more often. Only he comes close to the intensity the whole show needed badly, and that Martinelli may have felt while shooting it but doesn't really show on screen. The Siege of Vienna should be the stuff of thrilling cinema, but for that to happen someone will have to attack the subject again another time. Marc Bloch's advice might come in handy then.

Weird Noir: THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT (1961)

With Irvin Berwick's Crown International release from 1961, Something Weird's new Weird-Noir collection really starts living up to its label. The Seventh Commandment is the sort of film that has to have a low budget; it would lose its impoverished, grimy authenticity otherwise. It looks and feels like the movie the characters in the picture might make, filmed in a flophouse, given the opportunity. There's no glamour here, and that makes the femme fatale's pretensions to glamour all the more pathetic and vile. Berwick's picture takes place in a pathetic, vile universe unredeemed by the faith that also pervades it. Here, faith is an accomplice to murder.

The story starts with a plot device out of Gabriel Over the White House: a mediocre man acquires strange, divine powers after surviving a car wreck. Ted Mathews (Jonathan Kidd) is celebrating his graduation from a night-school course in business administration by joyriding with his impatient girlfriend Terry (Lyn Statten) when they collide with another car and go over an embankment. Barely hurt, Ted checks on the other car after verifying that Terry's still alive. He sees an unconscious, bleeding driver and, convinced that he's killed the man, seems to suffer traumatic amnesia, heralded by watery dissolves. He barely acknowledges the still-unconscious Terry before wandering from the accident scene.

Ted's wandering takes him to the trailer of an itinerant preacher with a Noah's Ark on wheels. This modern Noah takes Ted and sets him up as a faith healer. Now called Tad Morgan, he has talent for his work. We see him give hearing to the deaf and life to the limbs of a lame boy as a devout crowd watches slackjawed, arms prayerfully and creepily crossed over their chests. Tad's power keeps the cash flowing in, which he hopes to convert into a children's hospitals.

 

Soon, however, Terry reappears. She's been on a downward spiral since taking the rap for the car wreck. She keeps house with Pete (John Harmon), a wretch who rolls rummies to keep the couple in booze. She approaches Tad for some money, but when she realizes that Tad, barely remembering the accident, still believes that he killed the other driver, who only suffered a concussion, she also realizes that Tad is ripe for long-term blackmail. When she gets impatient with occasional checks -- the booze seems to run out faster and faster -- she decides to marry Tad, to Pete's jealous dismay. But first she has to get Tad seriously, profoundly liquored up. This lubricated courtship climaxes in a travesty of a marriage, Terry propping up a barely conscious Tad while a skeevy JP performs the ceremony, then dumping him to the floor the moment the man pronounces them husband and wife. Through it all, her strange if not inexplicable attraction to Pete persists. Codependence is a hell of a drug.

Having touched bottom, Tad struggles to free himself. Drastic action is necessary. The moment comes on a dark stretch of bridge as a weary Terry sits on the stone ledge and demands a foot rub. Tad complies but starts pressing too hard, until he heaves her over the side and into the drink. He runs repentant back to church, but as if she, too, had been transfigured by that original accident, Terry seems unkillable. Like a raunch Rasputin, or like a wet rat, she rises from the waters and returns home, where Pete has made himself at home, put on Tad's robe, and passed out drunk in the marriage bed. Seeing only the robe, and probably seeing red, Terri gets a gun out of a drawer and fires four shots into her true love.

 

Realizing her mistake, Terry stalks Tad at the church and through a cemetery as the film nears its dark epiphany. Confronting him at last, Terry fires her last two shots, but praise God! Tad's Bible absorbs the bullets. As if possessed, Tad begins reciting the Lord's Prayer as he puts his hands over Terry's throat and chokes the evil life out of her once and for all. He had been given the power to heal, but maybe his mission on Earth was to kill, after all. For now that his work is done, the heart attack hinted at earlier strikes him on the church steps, and his soul departs his body for parts unknown.

The synopsis speaks for itself: The Seventh Commandment suffers from a spiritual confusion that could only come from deep if not uncritical faith. It's all too straightfaced and guileless, if not artless, to be written off as cynical exploitation. It's like a tale told by a raving, repentant drunk, while he's still drunk. Naively depraved, its exploitative moralism is laughably appalling. You may be content to laugh, but you should be appalled. You may be appalled, but you ought to be laughing, too. This film is a genuine nightmare, but for someone to have this nightmare is sort of laughable. What I'm saying is that if you have a taste for something other than good taste, if you're morbidly fascinated by the sometimes feverish sincerity of bad cinema or just like to laugh at it, The Seventh Commandment comes highly recommended.

THE CHRISTIAN REVOLT (Amakusa Tokisada Shiro, 1962)

Outsiders often think of Japan as a homogeneous nation and culture, but the Japanese themselves are often quite conscious of the problems minorities face in their country. Throughout his career, the director Nagisa Oshima has shown a special concern for the mistreatment of minorities, particularly Koreans. In Amakusa Tokisada Shiro, Oshima took up the topic of the persecution of Christians under the Tokugawa Shogunate. The best known Japanese work on this subject outside Japan is probably the Catholic author Shusaku Endo's novel Silence, an adaptation of which has long been a dream project for Martin Scorsese. While Endo generously focuses on the persecution of European missionaries, Oshima looks at the suffering of Japanese Christians and their conflicted response to persecution. He also strives for a critical synthesis of Japanese and European models of artistic representation while questioning in an almost postmodern way exactly what in people's hearts can be represented pictorially at all.

Oshima's protagonist is a historical figure, Shiro Amakusa, but seems to have taken liberties with history by making a character who supposedly died while still in his teens a former samurai (Hashizo Okawa) who's regarded as a leader of his peasant community as well as a charismatic prophet. His people are being pushed to the breaking point by a rapacious nobility that blames inadequate tax revenue on Shiro's religion. The local samurai, with one noble exception, compete to devise ways to torture Christians and terrorize them into recanting their faith. One such turncoat, Emosaku (Rentaro Mikuni) has become a court painter, specializing in European-style oil painting which he claims represents a subject's actual personality better than traditional Japanese art. He balks, however, when commanded to paint Christians performing the "straw dance," -- they are wrapped in husks of straw, set on fire and set running -- and is suspected of remaining a Christian. Desperate to save himself, he rats out Christians inside the local lord's household. This undermines Shiro's long-term plan to stage an uprising within the castle to overthrow the oppressive lord, though the plan often seems like little more than a promise of redemption to his angry co-religionists.

Shiro is a conflicted hero with an uncertain understanding of his own religion, despite his mother's constant tutelage. He sends mixed messages to his people, assuring them that their persecution is not the will of God but that an enraged peasant going on a foolhardy mission of revenge was God's will. As the pressure builds for an uprising, he rationalizes it by saying that his people will fight as oppressed peasants, not as Christians in violation of the turn-the-other-cheek rule. Once the fighting is underway, it threatens to get out of his control when a charismatic ronin offers his assistance and more ronin join him. Still straddling the fence, Shiro defers to the ronin on military matters until several setbacks -- including the hostility of European military advisers to the shogun and an alleged excommunication from the Catholic Church -- forces a decisive three-way choice on the Christians. Shall they continue to fight the samurai head-on, as the ronin wants, disperse into smaller inconspicuous groups, as some others want, or fortify themselves in one place to resist a samurai assault, as Shiro wants. When Shiro is finally driven to assert himself violently in a showdown with the ronin, who has called him out as a coward, the feeling is unmistakable that there's nothing left for him to do but die -- and take thousands with him....

Oshima maintains a critical but not negative attitude toward Christianity, but constantly reminds us of the samurai cruelty that drove so many to become Christians as well as revolt against the social order. While many of the "history of cruelty" movies made in Europe focus on the atrocities perpetrated by Christians on others -- witches, heretics, etc. -- in Oshima's film the shoe is on the other foot. The effect is largely the same, however, since for the Japanese filmmaker Christians are the other made objects of empathy. His film really transcends my theoretical genre, rising from a litany of torture to the level of epic tragedy, filmed in appropriate long-take tableaux with theatrical intensity and chiaroscuro cinematography. Scenes often develop in slow-burn fashion, but the payoff, especially in the final confrontation between Shiro and the ronin, is tremendous.

Transcending his historical subject, Oshima also invites his audience to question whether his eloquently exquisite or brutal images can truly capture the spirit of the time or the personality of the players. This proposition is put forth explicitly in Emosaku's explication of the relative virtues of Japanese and European art. He tells his patron that Japanese painting is best for landscapes and "beautiful figures," while the European style is best for portraiture that evokes a subject's true self. Over the course of the film, it becomes clear that Oshima himself is testing these premises, switching frequently from huge close-ups designed to catch profound emotion to vast landscape long shots that reduce armies to ants against the mountains.

Cinema itself is a third thing entirely, and in one sequence of visually "rhyming" shots Oshima implicitly asks whether cinema can catch emotional truth any better than painting.

Between the subject and its representation stands the subjectivity of the artist, and that's what Emosaku really seems to stand for. Does his portrait show the truth of the lord -- the lord himself asks, "Are you trying to say I look repulsive?" -- or only Emosaku's opinion of the man. The question rises again when, after repeatedly refusing to paint a straw dance, Emosaku appears to have a real religious experience during the crucifixion of Shiro's mother and sister, along with Shiro's one samurai ally and his wife on either side of a single cross.

Oshima has illustrated Shiro's reaction, and that of the other Christians, by bathing them in floodlights and leading the camera through a lengthy tracking shot of dozens of despairing or prayerful close-ups.

The painter responds to the scene with a picture of Christ crucified amid a field of crosses as doves rise heavenward and the Virgin watches in the sky. Depending on the witness, his may have been as "true" a report of the event as Oshima's cinematography -- Shintaro Kawasaki did the brilliant actual work. In the same way, perhaps, Christianity is one thing to Shiro, another to his mother, and something else yet to someone else. All of this is a possibly pretentious way of saying that there's a lot going on in Amakusa Tokisada Shiro to make it interesting if not compelling for people without any special sympathy for Christianity. It seems to be a relatively unknown item for Americans in Oshima's filmography -- ignored even by the otherwise Oshima-rich Criterion Collection -- but its neglect is unjustified. The Christian Revolt is a dark epic that deserves wider renown.

No English subtitles on this trailer -- uploaded to YouTube by WorldCinemateque -- but it'll give you some idea of the moving images and the terrific score by Riichiro Manabe.

OF GODS AND MEN (Des Hommes et des Dieux, 2010)

In 1991 an "Arab spring" came to Algeria in the form of a free election apparently won by an Islamist party. It was snuffed out when the government voided the election, provoking a violent uprising and a reign of mutual terror, with the common people caught in the middle. Also caught in the middle were the French Trappist monks of the Tibhirine monastery in a village in the Taurus mountains, a vestige of France's colonial presence in the country. As portrayed in Xavier Beauvois' film, the monks are a welcome presence in their village. Brother Luc (Michael Lonsdale) runs a clinic for the poor, while the other monks earn their living by making jelly and other foodstuffs to sell on market day. At no time does the movie show them proselytizing to the Muslim natives. The villagers invite them to weddings and are entirely comfortable with the Christians' presence among them. Some even say that the monastery is the heart of the village. When the threat of terrorism closes in and some of the monks contemplate quitting the village, they describe themselves as birds on a branch, undecided about whether to leave or not. A village elder corrects them: they, the monks, are the branch, and the villagers the birds. The common people think the monastery offers them more protection than a government most despise. The monks themselves would rather not have the protection of a "corrupt" regime. Who'll protect them, then, when the terrorists come?...

Knowing little about Algeria except what I'd read about the civil war as it was happening, I don't know whether Beauvois painted too idealistic a picture of Christian-Islamic harmony in the mountain village, but it certainly is an appealing picture. I can imagine critics questioning the extent to which the village is portrayed depending upon the monks -- it could be called colonialist paternalism, I suppose -- but the monks themselves seem to live up to whatever vows of humility and service they took. They don't lord it over the villagers and clearly aren't out to convert anybody, based on what we see. Nor are the villagers uptight about their own religion; they're disgusted by the crimes of the Islamist terrorists, questioning whether the killers have read the same Qur'an they have. Some of them have, as we learn in a scene when Christian (Lambert Wilson), the monks' leader, persuades a guerilla leader to spare him with a quote from the Qur'an in French translation, which the militant finishes in the original. For the film's purposes, Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance, as Christianity is also at its best, until political fanatics distort its message.

Of Gods and Men makes a point of not just avoiding but repudiating the obvious parallel that might occur to viewers watching the monks stand their ground without government protection despite the increasing hopelessness of their situation. Unlike the terrorists, the monks don't intend to be martyrs. When they finally decide to stay, they don't do so to seek death. Christian makes clear that they should do everything possible to avoid death -- and one of the monks will survive the picture because he finds a place to hide at the right moment. But they also admit that their calling comes with a risk of death, and that, too, they should not avoid. Each feels called to serve God by serving the poor in a distant land, and they owe it to God and the poor to stay on despite the risk. The best argument against staying, at least without protection, may have been made by a government official who warns the monks that their deaths would only be exploited, presumably for propaganda purposes, by other parties. Some critics might say that Beauvois himself and his collaborators have exploited the story, but they may have intended it as a corrective to other, arguably more exploitative accounts -- those that portray the monks as religious martyrs, for instance.

There's no plot to the picture apart from the monks' dilemma and its resolution. It accumulates detail rather than build up narrative momentum, establishing the monks' place in the village and the routines of their private devotional lives. The early part of the picture has an almost documentary quality before the monks develop distinct personalities and individual issues like Luc's declining health and some slight resentment by the others of Christian's dominance. The story develops into a kind of spiritual Alamo, as each monk has to decide whether to stay or flee. The actors, led by Lonsdale and Wilson, are convincing as aging, intelligent men who've known each other for many years. As fate closes in on them, the film seems to grow in scale with sweeping helicopter shots of the village and hosts of soldiers swarming and scrambling nearby. It becomes a kind of epic without conventional action -- we get one shot of throat-slitting to establish the nature of the threat -- with the monks as nonviolent heroes facing inevitable doom as a matter of duty. The epic feeling is only enhanced by the final scenes in a snowy landscape that I, in my geographic ignorance, didn't expect to see in Algeria. But the epic retains an intimate scale in which the fates of nine men mean something, however relevant the episode may have been to the larger conflict.

Beauvois doesn't try to overdramatize this, with one awkward exception: a "last supper" scene in which the monks share wine and listen to a cassette of Swan Lake. This play for pathos seems superfluous and its focus on misty-eyed close-ups deprives the monks of their main strength as characters -- their intelligence. Worse, at least for some American viewers, the excerpt from the ballet we hear is the one long associated with the Universal Horror film cycle and now with the madness of Black Swan, so the effect for me was probably something different from what Beauvois intended. But this is an exceptional false note in an otherwise judicious portrait of men who became martyrs of a kind whether they wanted to or not.

MOTHER JOAN OF THE ANGELS (Matka Joanna od Aniolow, 1961)

What do all those women do behind those convent walls? That's the question behind the nunsploitation subgenre, a global phenomenon that found expression inside the old Communist Bloc with this film by Jerzy Kawalerowicz. Some accounts of this movie claim that it's loosely based on the same historical incidents that inspired Ken Russell's ultimate nunsploitation epic, The Devils. If so, then it's more of a loose thematic sequel to that core story, with the charismatic priest played by Oliver Reed in the Russell film already dead by the time Kawalerowicz's film begins. Adapting a Polish novella, Kawalerowicz gives the story a different emphasis that makes Mother Joan more than an alternate version of The Devils while still touching many of the mandatory nunsploitation bases.

The story focuses on Father Joseph Suryn, newly arrived in a village dominated by a convent swept by demonic possession. The young priest has been sent to aid in a long-term exorcism project; the entire convent, led by the title nun, seems to be possessed. Suryn is unworldly and aloof, while in the village the possessions and exorcisms are the stuff of gossip as well as superstition. What gives Mother Joan its distinctive quality is the way both the possessions and the exorcisms are treated as an almost-normalized public spectacle. The villagers gather to watch the nuns march into church, the next-to-last in line spinning around compulsively, and subject themselves to attempted exorcism. The efforts of the priests only inspire the nuns to frenzy, with Mother Joan herself the most flamboyant performer. In some way the spectacle resembles a show trial, except that justice, or the will of God, never seems to prevail, while the suspects freely confess their guilt yet refuse to repent. One character suggests that Christians embrace the concept of demonic possession because it somehow confirms the existence of God, and that seems to be a key to understanding this film.

Lucyna Winnicka is possessed by the turbulent spirit of Mother Joan of the Angels.

Along the way, Suryn gets a major crush on Mother Joan. He tries to deal with it by flogging himself, but to no avail. Trying to get to the bottom of the possession question, he consults a Jewish rabbi who harangues him about the angels who mated humans and spawned a race of giants and finally tells Suryn that the two of them are the same. Given that they're played by the same actor, Mieczyslaw Volt, the rabbi has a point, though that fact also raises the question of whether the meeting was real or only in Suryn's head. In any event, Suryn finally decides that the only thing he can do to save Joan, and in some way save himself, is to invite the devils inside her to take him over. In fact, this licenses him to let the demons already inside him rise to the surface, with dire consequences for some of the other villagers....

Mother Joan is not one of the "history of cruelty" films I've seen from all over Europe from the 1960s. Kawalerowicz doesn't make a fetish of the ordeals to which Joan is subjected, and we never see anyone burnt at the prominently displayed stake. His attitude toward the people of 17th century Poland is generally compassionate. The common folk are folksy and bawdy and musical and superstitious, unafraid to peep through a window to watch Suryn and Joan in bed together. This movie isn't really about the overwhelming oppressive power of the state or the church, focusing instead on one man's breakdown and its several causes. Volt makes the breakdown convincing, while Lucyna Winnicka in the title role catches the unstable ambiguity of a character self-consciously committed to her role in the exorcism drama. She tells Suryn that she enjoys being possessed; is she acting possessed when she says that, or is she embracing the liberating power of performance? Whatever the answer, it's all too much for poor Suryn, and the two characters arguably illustrate a dangerous distinction between internalized private and dramatized public religion, the one corrupting the other.

On the nunsploitation spectrum Mother Joan falls closer to the high-end, high-toned stuff like Black Narcissus than to the wild, salacious fare that gives the subgenre its name. Nudity is at a minimum here and there's no hint of lesbianism. That may disappoint hardcore nunsploitation fans, but if you just like to see women in habits acting nutty, this film as plenty of that to offer. In the bargain, you'll also get a persuasive period piece with strong performances that are marred somewhat by the awful English subtitles on the Polstar DVD. Spelling and grammar errors abound, and some lines simply don't make sense as translated. Fortunately, the story still makes sense and you can still appreciate the overall effort. This is another film of surprisingly subversive potential from a Communist country, and an interesting one by any country's standard.

LOURDES (2009)

The pilgrimage shrine at the spring where St. Bernadette is said to have seen the Virgin Mary, where the waters are reputed to have healing powers for the faithful, has been a ripe subject for satire almost from the beginning. In Austrian director Jessica Hausner Lourdes has found a relatively benign satirist. She avoids what might look like the obvious object of satire from the secular humanist perspective, the mythos of heavenly visitations and miraculous healings. Instead of an attack on faith and spirituality, Lourdes is a critique of the de-sacralization of the pilgrimage experience through custom, bureaucracy and commodification.

Hausner follows a tour group of pilgrims, who look much like any tour group found in any tourist trap, except for a disproportion of wheelchairs. They're thoroughly supervised, with the most handicapped assigned "helpers" who feed them and wheel them around if they haven't loved ones to do that for them. For the helpers, in many cases, working at Lourdes is just another job and not the most appealing among all those available to young people. For the clergy, too, a certain institutional cynicism sets in after a while. A priest tells this joke: Jesus, Mary and the Holy Spirit are discussing where to go on vacation this year. The Holy Spirit suggests Bethlehem and Jerusalem, but Jesus shoots down those ideas because they've gone to both places so often. How about Lourdes, then? The Blessed Virgin thinks that's a great idea -- "I've never been there before!"

One of our tour group is Christine (Sylvie Testud), who suffers from MS. She isn't the most enthusiastic or the most devout pilgrim, especially compared to her roommate, Frau Hartl (Gilette Barbier), who often proves more of a helper to Christine than the young woman who actually holds that job. The Lourdes environment isn't exactly conducive to spirituality, except perhaps for the most simplistically devout. Frau Hartl will make her devotions to a life-size Virgin statue in a hotel lobby, but pilgrims in town can pass souvenir shops filled with thousands of smaller-scale statues without batting an eye. If anything, the clergy seem determined to dampen expectations of miracles. We learn over the course of the film that the Church is actually admirably objective, though almost to a demoralizing degree, about appraising healings. They don't want to jump the gun before a relapse; to qualify as a miracle, a cure has to be permanent. As if to foreshadow the main event of the film, characters discuss a reputed recent miracle in which another MS patient rose and walked. A priest cautions them that with MS especially remissions and relapses are frequent.

Naturally, it's Christine who rises and walks. The news is received with skeptical tentativeness by the authorities, with reflected glory by some pilgrims, and with barely-concealed jealousy by others. The fortunate one gets a particularly dirty look from one mother whose daughter experienced a sort of near-miss earlier in the pilgrimage, recognizing and responding to her parent before lapsing back into unresponsiveness. The ways of God being, as ever, inscrutable, people wonder how Christine, of all pilgrims, deserves His grace. The mystery of His ways grows deeper as a helper suffers a seizure and is hospitalized, freeing up a spot for Christine, who had been disqualified earlier due to her disability, to go on the group's mountain-climbing trip. The group is eager, of course, to have their picture re-shot with an ambulatory Christine for the historical record. The lucky woman herself seems bemused rather than transfigured, and the story of her fellow-sufferer from the earlier pilgrimage clearly troubles her. Still, she takes advantage of every opportunity to climb mountains, dance with the uniformed male helpers and eat dessert with her own hands. Will it last? Christine takes a tumble on the dance floor, but she's still on her feet to accept the Best Pilgrim award at the end. Beyond that?...

Lourdes leaves the final answer ambiguous. To spoil things, it ends with Christine settling back into her wheelchair, which Frau Hartl has thoughtfully kept near, but that alone isn't enough for us to conclude that she'll never walk again. Taking her seat may be an act of simple weariness -- the spectacle of the helpers performing like asses at a final party is admittedly wearying -- or it may be a gesture of resignation. The most troubling thing about it is the sense that it doesn't matter one way or the other, to Christine or the other pilgrims. From a spiritual perspective, one of several from which viewers can choose, the message may be that the "miracle" itself doesn't matter, that there's no point to Christine staying on her feet because no one, her included, has responded to the healing with the appropriate reverence. An alternate message can be that Christine may as well sit down because the cure hasn't really changed the empty life to which she must return now that the pilgrimage is over. I don't find the ambiguity frustrating; it actually testifies to the subtle realism of Hausner's narrative. There may or may not have been a miracle, but Lourdes takes place in an environment where theme doesn't impose a single meaning on events.

Give our star a round of applause; Sylvie Testud, ladies and gentlemen!

Had this film been made in the United States, Sylvie Testud might have been a front-runner for the Oscar last year, since her role is what we tend to think of as awards-bait. I say "might have been" because she gives a nicely understated performance, unburdened by vocal tics or the need to give revelatory speeches, that might not have set off the Academy's master-thespian meter. As it is, Testud won a European Film Award for her trouble, which may prove that the less-is-more principle is appreciated somewhere.

The film itself plays out with commendable clarity, making its satirical points obviously enough but not blatantly. The nature of its satire reminded me a little of Robert Altman's movies, though Hausner does largely without the American's diffusive sprawl, keeping us consistently focused on Christine while emphasizing a few supporting characters enough to cinch the sense of a realistic social environment. Lourdes might have made a great subject for Altman (not to mention, closer to home, a subject for Jacques Tati), while the closest American equivalent to its concern with recovery and relapse is arguably Penny Marshall's Awakenings. Hausner's Lourdes is better than that and deserves some belated recognition in the U.S. as one of the better European films of the past year or so.

SON OF MAN (2006)

Mark Dornford-May's movie, only his second feature, is a retelling of the Jesus story in 21st century Africa. Stylistically it's most likely inspiration is Pier Paolo Pasolini's Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), which, while ostensibly set in the correct historical period, embraced anachronistic elements (like American gospel songs on the soundtrack) while paring away the opulent details that characterized Hollywood gospel films. Son of Man is a very musical film, its range extending from spiritual ecstasy to choral defiance. The music carries much of the burden of the film's spirituality. The story, as told here, is arguably more mundane.

The opening promises something less mundane. We start with the temptations in the desert, Satan goading a Jesus in robes and whiteface to make stones from bread, jump off a cliff, etc. Jesus (Andile Kosi) has enough, finally, and shoves the Evil One off a sand dune. "Get thee behind me Satan," he says -- familiar enough. What follows isn't: "This is my world!" Satan disagrees, of course.

It looks like we've been dropped in the middle of a familiar story in well-established modern cinema fashion, but this opening proves more of a prologue, a preliminary to Jesus's decision to be born in the African kingdom of Judea, a nation torn by strife pitting King Herode against a shadowy foreign-backed Democratic Coalition. In a village a woman flees from machete-wielding dancing killers. She plays dead in a schoolroom full of massacred children, and the soldiers (and Satan) miss her. Just when she thinks she's safe an angel, a child adorned with white feathers, performs the annunciation. She and her husband (his role as minimal as ever) become refugees, and she gives birth in a shed as a host of child-angels summon shepherds to the scene. A few years later the family barely escapes a massacre of children at a checkpoint. The child angel appears again, offering little Jesus his protection. The boy rejects it, reaffirming: "This is my world!"

From this point, Dornford-May and his writing team try to have things both ways. Jesus retains his own divine powers, enabling him to heal, exorcise and revive. But while he's clearly a supernatural being, his kingdom is very much of this (or "my") world. In fact, he hardly talks of a "kingdom" at all, of God or otherwise. His is a political mission. He denounces Herode and his foreign-manipulated successors in turn; he denounces the imperialist mentality that dismisses Africans as mere tribal savages; he denounces the U.S. for blocking the production of cheap medicine through the use of commercial patents. "We have been lied to," he repeats, "Evil did not fall." His answer is solidarity, justice and nonviolence. Some of his own disciples have been guerrilla fighters (some of the others are women); he makes them give up their guns. As videos of his sermons circulate and stories of miracles boost his credibility, the Democratic Coalition sees him as a political rival. They want their inside man, Judas, to get the evidence they need to justify taking Jesus down. The Passion, or at least the opening act, will be televised -- or at least it could be later....

As a non-believer, it may not be my business to say whether Son of Man gets Jesus "right" or not, but two things about it struck me as peculiar. First, the concept of Jesus as a primarily political actor is bound to be controversial. The idea of a Jesus who really says nothing about God or God's supposed love for man, will be a deal-breaker for many Christians. For my part, I do wonder whether it misrepresents the historical Jesus, but some people say the Gospels misrepresent him, also. Second, Christianity is going to have a very different history in the video age. The African Jesus is sometimes surrounded by camcorders, and some of his sayings, at least, can be recorded indisputably. But because the filmmakers are bound by the traditional Jesus narrative, they don't really explore the implications of an Incarnation in the Information Age.

Son of Man is ultimately a cultural rather than a religious document, though it could be described as liberation theology. Its effort to make Jesus relevant to contemporary Africa tells us as much about the filmmakers' vision of Africa as it does about their idea of Christianity. As a Jesus movie, some viewers will find it more palatable than the more gruesomely faithful Passion of the Christ. People who admire the Pasolini Gospel may find Son of Man a natural next step, though they might be surprised to see the end borrow the long shadow symbolizing resurrection from the Nicholas Ray King of Kings. For people who are students or fans of the Jesus genre, as I am to an extent, Son of Man is obviously worth seeing, but I'd also recommend it as a film of interest, if not necessarily a great film, to anyone interested in politically-committed African cinema.

This trailer, uploaded to YouTube by AiMfilmfest, gives a good idea of the mix of modernity and archetypes throughout the picture:

THE SILVER CHALICE (1954)

At Easter time I always like to look at "bible" movies. It's good to define the term loosely, since many such films aren't adapted directly from the Old or New Testament. Once upon a time novels set during the time of scripture made up a popular genre of fiction, with Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur setting the template and Lloyd C. Douglas's The Robe probably being the twentieth-century champion. I see at the library that such books are still written, but you don't see them on the best seller lists as often as you used to. When The Robe was used to roll out Cinemascope and became a sort of Avatar of its time in 1953, Hollywood started grabbing other bible novels to make into widescreen showcases. Warner Bros. snapped up Thomas B. Costain's 1952 best seller about the making of the Holy Grail and set it up to launch Paul Newman as a new star. It was a famous flop that nearly killed Newman's career in the cradle, but it fascinated me when I saw bits of it as a kid. It looked profoundly different from the other epics I enjoyed, and as far as I was concerned Jack Palance was the star. He played Simon the Magician (aka Simon Magus), the nearest thing I could see to a villain of the piece, but in such a soft-spoken, almost reasonable way that he was easily the most interesting thing on screen.

Above, the first shot of Paul Newman's movie career. Below, Jack Palance performs on what is, believe it or not, a major studio set.

This weekend I decided to give The Silver Chalice a fresh look. It's a gravely problematic movie visually, actually quite ambitious in its own way. It was such a way, however, that made it look unambitious to many contemporary observers. Producer-director Victor Saville (who also held the rights to Mike Hammer and produced Kiss Me Deadly the following year) and his design team decided against building big free-standing sets and against realism of any kind as a rule. They opted for a sometimes minimalist, sometimes abstract production design that emphasized clean lines and open spaces when it wasn't obviously self-indulgent or utterly incompetent. To call the results hit-or-miss is to understate the extremes. Sometimes they succeed brilliantly and manage stunning images. Sometimes they look like amateurs. It's the inconsistency rather than the experiment itself that handicaps this film.

While the movie is pictorially erratic, the story and most of the acting are fatal. We're following the adventures of Basil, a poor boy adopted by an old, wealthy and childless merchant (E.G. Marshall) against the wishes of his brother. When the old man dies, the brother bribes Antioch officials and a witness to the adoption into denouncing Basil as a slave, not the heir to the estate. Basil is promptly sold to a family that puts him to work as a sculptor and silversmith. In servitude he encounters an old friend, Helena (first Natalie Wood, then Virginia Mayo), a slave who ran away from the old merchant's household and is now hanging out with Simon the Magician. Helena will be torn between Basil and Simon for the rest of the picture, while Basil will be torn between her and Deborra (Pier Angeli), the granddaughter of Joseph of Arimathea. Using Luke the Evangelist as his agent, Joseph buys Basil's freedom and brings him to Jerusalem to craft a silver chalice that will house the drinking cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper. Helena ends up in the holy city when the Sicarii, a Jewish insurgent group, recruit Simon to be their spokesman and messiah.

The Sicarii are a promising but underutilized element of the story. I don't know if they're meant to represent the People's Front of Judea or the Judean People's Front, but as they're shown in the movie the question is really whether they're stand-ins for fascists or communists. Since the year is 1954, let's opt for commies. They're obsessed with violent revolution, but Simon, a fellow-traveller in the parlance of the time (the 1950s, that is), instructs them in the need to project a benevolent front of freedom and spirituality. This movie really needs a band of black-clad sword-wielding thugs to liven up things, but Saville never thinks to stage any anti-Roman mayhem. This film is hopelessly short on action, though things could be worse. At 135 minutes, Chalice is relatively brief by epic standards.

Pier Angeli is so holy, she sort of has a halo already.

Virginia Mayo has to choose between Newman's youthful ardor and Palance's magic fruit. What would you do?

Anyway, the story loses interest in the Sicarii after a while, and the scene shifts from Jerusalem to Rome. Basil goes there to meet the Apostle Peter (Lorne Greene) and make a study of his face for the Chalice. Simon and Helena head there because the Magician has a grudge against Peter (documented in the Acts of the Apostles and other early Christian sources) and wants to discredit Christianity as an act of spite. He convinces the Sicarii to let him go on the premise that news of Peter's expected humiliation will disabuse Judeans of their silly new religion of peace and love and make them receptive to the Sicarii war cry. Helena steers him toward Rome because she knows that Basil's going there with the Chalice.

Nero's palace is one of the film's more successful sets. Within it, Palance adds snake-handling to his wonder-working repertoire.

Simon wants to destroy the Chalice as part of his revenge on Peter, but he's also starting to believe his own propaganda. Believing himself a true miracle worker as well as a magician, he convinces the Emperor Nero to let him prove his superior spirituality by doing one thing neither Peter nor Jesus ever did: leap off a tall tower and fly.

Close up, Palance's final costume change makes him look like an unmentionably virile superhero. From afar, it's more like an ancient Acme Bat-Man Outfit.

I hope I don't seem to be boasting if I say that my description is more interesting than the film itself. The screenplay by Lesser Samuels is quite literally lesser work. The dialogue is clunky in the bad-epic manner without rising to the memorable word-jazz weirdness of something like The Ten Commandments. Newman is as bad as legend claims, as he often conceded himself. In his defense, Basil is a hopeless part. He has no chemistry at all with Mayo, who seems dreadfully out of place here, but fares better with the younger, more modern looking Angeli. Jack Palance steals the film with ease, coasting along a character arc that takes him from amiable cynicism to rapturous delusions of grandeur. If the visuals don't attract you, he may be the one reason to give this film a look. Seeing him as Simon after so many years vindicates my memory that he was the best thing about the movie. Overall, The Silver Chalice deserves a little extra credit for its pictorial ambition, and it's worth noting that it isn't even the worst religious epic of its release year -- that's The Egyptian by a good margin. If you want real sword-&-sandal entertainment from 1954, go with Delmer Daves's Demetrius and the Gladiators. But if you want a genuinely eccentric effort from Hollywood's epic era, then Chalice is on TCM on Easter afternoon for you to judge for yourselves.