Guided by a longtime prejudice against Broadway musicals and reinforced by a decade dedicated to fighting bathrobe-and-beard Bible films, I attended a preview screening, fully prepared to attack Superstar with all the snide sophistication I could muster. To my absolute amazement, I found the film to be compelling, moving and visually stunning. It is superb cinema, stimulating theology, and in no way anti-Semitic.

Superstar … accomplishes something I have never before seen in a biblical film: it portrays Jesus in a first century setting with a 20th century sensitivity…. [My] reaction, both cinematic and theological, is that Superstar is a fitting marriage of message and medium. This film works because the gospel story is meant to be told in poetry rather than prose. All previous Bible films … were hung up on narrative prose, with each episode presented in lurid and literal detail. Superstar sings its message in a contemporary idiom; the familiar characters have been deliberately cast in unexpected guises to reveal new insights into the Gospels…. (p. 693)

No dialogue intrudes to impose prose on the film. The emotional interchanges are sung to emphasize their larger-than-life significance. The film's hero is Judas; he is the character with whom the audience identifies. Some fear had been expressed that with a black performer … in the role, a "racist" implication might be drawn. On the contrary, Judas is presented as the only real friend Jesus has, struggling desperately to make him follow a reasonable course of action which will avoid bringing down the wrath of the establishment upon the whole lot of them…. Judas' relationship to Jesus is one of perplexed admiration, leading him to take steps that may or may not help to turn Jesus back toward the earlier path that once promised to lead to success. Far from being racist, this portrayal of Judas makes him the film's "everyman," the figure drawn to Jesus and yet unable to comprehend the strange demands he makes both on himself and on his followers. (pp. 693-94)

The charge of anti-Semitism plagued the original stage production, and there are indications that similar criticism has already been heard regarding the film version. The Pharisees, obviously villains in this opera, are far from being "Jewish" villains. They constitute the establishment, troubled by the admiration evoked by the reckless life style of Jesus…. [The] Pharisees represent the same kind of ominous power that Sergei Eisenstein gave his elaborately costumed and hooded German soldiers as they fought across the ice against Russian troops in his classic film Alexander Nevsky….

Any charge of anti-Semitism leveled against this film will be based not on Superstar itself but on feelings generated by earlier portrayals of Jews as "Christ-killers." Such dated emotions are understandable, for there is an ugly history of anti-Semitism in our popular culture; the charge, however, is not appropriate for Superstar….

[The young performers] have presented a vision of the man Jesus in their own musical style, and in the process have raised the same questions that have always been raised about him: Who is he and what is this strange power that drives him?

Jesus Christ Superstar is a film with its light moments … and its profound insights…. Above all, it is a work of cinematic art which just might strengthen the viewer's faith in its original story. (p. 694)