AST month, Outreach Inc., a Christian marketing company retained by Mel Gibson, sent a DVD trailer of Mr. Gibson's new film "The Passion of the Christ" to thousands of churches, urging pastors to promote "what may well be the greatest outreach opportunity in the past 2,000 years."
That may not be a category that gets much recognition at the Oscars. But evangelical groups have good reason to believe that Gibson's movie could become an important tool for their recruiting efforts. In fact, according to some missionary organizations, for the last couple of decades the most powerful tool they've had at their disposal is another film ? "Jesus," a 1979 Warner Brothers release that has shown a remarkable ability to attract people to the Christian faith. The movie is all but forgotten in Hollywood, but it has been screened in so many big cities and tiny villages in so many countries that it is sometimes described as the most watched movie of all time. Campus Crusade for Christ credits it with saving 176 million souls.
For a film with a now-mythic reputation, its beginnings were less than auspicious. Bill Bright, an Oklahoma-born confectioner who would go on to found the Campus Crusade for Christ, spent a good chunk of his early career in Los Angeles trying to convert Hollywood stars. He dreamed of creating a powerful film about the life of Christ, and tried unsuccessfully to persuade Cecil B. DeMille to direct a talkie remake of his 1927 silent film, "The King of Kings."
In 1976 Bright stumbled upon a new collaborator. The British producer John Heyman wasn't an obvious choice for a Jesus biopic: a German Jew, he had previously produced "Twinky," in which Charles Bronson plays a pornographic novelist married to a 16-year old. But Mr. Heyman had also produced a series of 15-minute shorts based on the Bible, and he and Bright became partners. Mr. Heyman's motivation, as he now describes it, was financial: "I believed the best-selling book in the world would sell a lot of 8-millimeter and 16-millimeter films."
Both patron and producer committed themselves to historical verisimilitude. The film was shot on location in Israel, and every day, film was sent to a panel of biblical scholars for inspection. "We were required to refilm three days' work," Mr. Heyman recalled in a recent e-mail message, "because we had shown eucalyptus trees in a variety of shots. Eucalyptus trees were introduced to Palestine very much later." The British stage actor Brian Deacon was selected, among other reasons, for his "ethnically correct" olive complexion. The cast is strangely filled with Jewish-sounding names: Rivka Neuman (Mary), Leonid Weinstein (James), Eli Cohen (John the Baptist). For extras, Mr. Heyman cast crowds of Yemenite Jews ? because, as Paul Eshleman, the director of the organization that distributes the film, told The Christian Century magazine in 2001, "their facial features have changed the least over 2,000 years."
Unlike biblical epics such as DeMille's "Ten Commandments" and George Stevens's "Greatest Story Ever Told," which add psychological back story and distracting celebrity cameos, "Jesus" presents itself as a literal adaptation. After an incongruous shot of planet Earth from space, screen text announces that the film is a "documentary taken entirely from the Gospel of Luke." A narrator reads from that text ? and then mysteriously disappears midway through the film. Little effort is taken to render Jesus as a three-dimensional character: his dialogue mostly consists of unabridged passages of scripture, and he's barely shown doing anything other than performing miracles and delivering speeches. In terms of special effects, the film offers poofs of smoke and gauzy halos to suggest miracles and angels; a hissing snake and a booming voiceover represent the devil. In the scene in which the Romans beat Jesus, their punches obviously don't connect.
