KING OF KINGS

"King of Kings" was the most politicised of all the Biblical epics and it was also one of the best. Wags nick-named it 'I Was a Teenage Jesus' and it certainly isn't totally free of the piety that defeated so many of its ilk, but it's also surprisingly blood-thirsty and when it didn't give in to those pieties, it worked a treat. It had a surprisingly fine script from Philip Yordan, (the Sermon on the Mount is a tour-de-force), that fleshes out subsidiary characters like Barrabas, Pilate and even Mary, the mother of Jesus in ways other Biblical films ignored. If Jeffrey Hunter was too blond and blue-eyed as Jesus, Irish actress Siobhan McKenna was perfectly cast as Mary, Hurd Hatfield was a first-rate Pilate and there's fine work from the likes of Viveca Lindfors, Rita Gam and Ron Randell in the supporting cast. Splendidly photographed too as befits films of this kind, (director Nicholas Ray's use of colour and the widescreen is as fine as ever), yet critically undervalued and now often dismissed when reviewing Ray's oeuvre.