EVEN the sacred tales from the Bible have not escaped the power of cinema to retell the story, re-interpret the Good News, as we Christians call the stories from the Book. In these narratives, we have learned to imagine figures and characters that would have remained obscure or abstract without the filmmakers’ lenses.
While in some old religions it is taboo to put on-screen the face of Jesus Christ and the prophets, films have shown to naturally breach this difficult rule. If ever, when Christ’s face is not shown on-screen, it is no more than a style—a kind of stagy editing—rather than obeisance to or observance of letting the forbidden remain so.
The traditions of portraying sacred-historical individuals that may be metaphorical can be fascinating. Actors learn how to deal with stock characters or proceed to flesh out significant roles from the ancient past by tapping into sources that vary from the anecdotal to apocryphal and the conjectural. At the start of these Biblical films, caveats appear on the screen telling us how the production has used poetic license to bring to life the stories that happened thousands of years ago even as they are careful to respect the text. It is the tolerance of the believers and the free spirit of literatures that help gloss over the sometimes highly excitable delineation of these kings and queens, and saints and sinners.
In this season of Christmas, I spent hours watching films dealing with Jesus. My interest is not to focus on the Christ because that would mean my account would be drawn toward his Passion and Death. I was devoting hours marveling at the episodes touching on the first Christmas. I was approaching more the life of Mary and the birth of the Messiah.
In The Greatest Story Ever Told, Dorothy McGuire, is a most distractingly glamorous Blessed Virgin Mary. It could be the technology or the narrative of the period but up close, she looks more like a 1950s fashion catalogue model than one who has suffered earlier the judgment of a society that has rigid, if not primitive laws on a woman who bears a child outside wedlock.
With three directors acknowledged—George Stevens (A Place in the Sun, Giant), Jean Negulesco (Johnny Belinda, Three Coins in the Fountain) and David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia, A Passage to India)—The Greatest Story Ever Told is well remembered then for the sweeping, dramatic visuals. Lean and Stevens were known for their monumental films; Negulesco was once dubbed the “first master of the cinemascope.”
There is an obscure, made-for-television film called Mary, Mother of Jesus, which looks at the life of Jesus from the point of view of his mother, Mary. Given such a focus, we are given a wide space to confront the portrayal of this woman who is central to the story of Christmas.
Mary is played by two actresses—with the Swedish-American actress Melinda Kinnaman in the part of the young Mary; and Pernilla August, a Swedish actress, as the Blessed Mother when she returns from the 12-year exile in Egypt with the young Jesus and her husband, Joseph. Pernilla has the gravitas—a Best Actress in the 1992 Cannes for her film with Ingmar Bergman, The Best Intentions; Kinnaman has the face that we identify with the Mary of our catechism class and Catholic upbringing.
Both actresses acquit themselves very well in the character but, given how the character has been written, the young Mary of Kinnaman is truthfully young and innocent, as we have been told for years. She is alone in the field when she senses something in the air. From afar, she sees a man in white robes, the sun seemingly gleaming where the face is. Terrified, she is about to turn away when the voice comes. Annunciation!
We, too, hear that voice and we, too, recognize those lines: “Hail Mary….” Then she bows and says the eternal line we know by heart, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”
In Mary, Mother of Jesus, we see the struggle of the Virgin Mother and that appellation. In one scene, as Mary arrives near the place of her cousin Elizabeth, she ominously encounters a woman being stoned to death because she is an adulteress. Here in this film, we see a more robust, temperamental, human Joseph. He cannot understand the idea of the Holy Spirit being the cause of that thing in the womb of the woman betrothed to him. Interestingly, we share that disbelief as the magnificently realistic scene unfolds.
Mary, Mother of Jesus is directed by Kevin Connor and stars Christian Bale as Jesus.
However, in Christ’s passion and death, or in His Birth, there is only one Mary in my book. She is Olivia Hussey, the English-Argentine icon of the late 1960s and 1970s.
As the Virgin Mother in the 1977 British-Italian epic film and TV drama serial, Jesus of Nazareth, Hussey’s youth and ethereal beauty are drafted once more by the same master filmmaker, Franco Zeffirelli, to delineate the singular purity of the woman fated to be the Mother of God. Earlier, in 1968, Hussey finally realized for us the true age of Shakespeare’s Juliet—well, close to it. Remember, in Shakespeare’s words, Juliet “hath not seen the age of fourteen years,” meaning she was 13. Olivia Hussey was 15 during the filming of the tragic tale and Leonard Whiting as Romeo was 17.
The same infinite youth is apparent in the Virgin Mary of Jesus of Nazareth. But, outside the age, it is the clean, clear, delicate grace on the face of Olivia Hussey that captivates us when, at night, the small window to her room opens and a soft breeze and a softer light wake her up.
She retreats amazed and scared; then she slowly bends down, half-kneeling, half-seated on the ground, as she whispers, “Behold the handmaiden of the Lord.” It is a tableau vivant that will inspire arts and artists through centuries, a moment that will confound theologians. But there in that humble act comes forth the very first Christmas.