I Love to Tell the Story

“In the beginning wuz the Word an’ the Word wuz with Gahd” —so begins in an off-screen voice The Greatest Story Ever Told, against a background of starry heavens that outflickers anything seen outside a planetarium. Yes, here I am again, at the Cinerama Theater on Boston’s Washington Street between the nudies and the lewdies, stuck with another of those interminable epics at one of those interminable matinées. I have seen them all, from the original silent Ten Commandments to the sound explosions of the last King of Kings, and I have long since given up the idea that any screen good can come out of Nazareth. But even when, the rock-candy religion is removed, the lay epics are quite as bad—Cleopatra, Spartacus, Exodus. … I still think it ought to be possible to make an adult film on the epic scale and achieve the essential object of all epic makers sacred and profane, i.e. to recoup on a fifteen-million-dollar investment. For their attention I suggest offhandedly the following objects: Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of Russia, the greatest and probably the final campaign on the classical model; Hardy’s The Dynasts; the real T. E. Lawrence of The Mint, rather than the fake one of The Seven Pillars.

But back to the late Fulton Oursler’s amplification of the Authorized Version. I believe Oursler wrote both a Catholic and a Protestant version of The Greatest Story Ever Told, and I understand before his death had been planning Jewish, Unitarian, Christian Science and Free-Thinking versions. Anyhow this present one has been gingered up by Henry Denker in creative association with our own Carl Sandburg, who, I suspect and trust, did no more than strum a banjo in the background. Of course, the basic flaw of all these religious epics is the insincerity of the producers and script writers, most of whom privately equate the Greatest Story with the old Bug House Fables. Yet they feel they can trade to their profit on the uncritical pieties of the hinterland, the kind of well-meaning semi-literates who made Oursler and my late fellow-townsman Lloyd Douglas into best-selling authors.

FR

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Francis Russell

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“In the beginning wuz the Word an’ the Word wuz with Gahd” —so begins in an off-screen voice The Greatest Story Ever Told, against a background of starry heavens that outflickers anything seen outside a planetarium. Yes, here I am again, at the Cinerama Theater on Boston’s Washington Street between the nudies and the lewdies, stuck with another of those interminable epics at one of those interminable matinées. I have seen them all, from the original silent Ten Commandments to the sound explosions of the last King of Kings, and I have long since given up the idea that any screen good can come out of Nazareth. But even when, the rock-candy religion is removed, the lay epics are quite as bad—Cleopatra, Spartacus, Exodus. … I still think it ought to be possible to make an adult film on the epic scale and achieve the essential object of all epic makers sacred and profane, i.e. to recoup on a fifteen-million-dollar investment. For their attention I suggest offhandedly the following objects: Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of Russia, the greatest and probably the final campaign on the classical model; Hardy’s The Dynasts; the real T. E. Lawrence of The Mint, rather than the fake one of The Seven Pillars.

But back to the late Fulton Oursler’s amplification of the Authorized Version. I believe Oursler wrote both a Catholic and a Protestant version of The Greatest Story Ever Told, and I understand before his death had been planning Jewish, Unitarian, Christian Science and Free-Thinking versions. Anyhow this present one has been gingered up by Henry Denker in creative association with our own Carl Sandburg, who, I suspect and trust, did no more than strum a banjo in the background. Of course, the basic flaw of all these religious epics is the insincerity of the producers and script writers, most of whom privately equate the Greatest Story with the old Bug House Fables. Yet they feel they can trade to their profit on the uncritical pieties of the hinterland, the kind of well-meaning semi-literates who made Oursler and my late fellow-townsman Lloyd Douglas into best-selling authors.