And also according to Karl Marx. Pier Paolo Pasolini, a Leftist and atheist, dips into his sacred source material with a highly suspicious selectivity, and extracts an image of Jesus Christ as a revolutionary. Pasolini scored some automatic points with the critics by seeming to take as his inspiration their traditional jibes at Hollywood Biblical epics: he does not employ Jeffrey Hunter or somebody as Jesus, and he does not employ Miklos Rozsa or somebody to write the music, and he does not spread millions of dollars among hundreds of other highly paid professionals to guarantee the product a spanking look. The rustic nonactor who plays Jesus here, however, is a little further removed from charisma than even Jeffrey Hunter, and Bach and Mozart are a safer and shorter route to respectability than Miklos Rozsa, and the unconventional and somewhat constipated flow of images (Pasolini likes to start a scene with a tight closeup, or two, or three, and then build outward from there), although certainly intended as a flouting of "professionalism," also indicates an ineptitude in getting across the basic facts of the narrative. (1965) — Duncan Shepherd
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