Almost from the beginning of the commercial cinema, it was discovered that the religious film, preferably a religious epic or spectacular, was one of the most foolproof formulas for box-office success. From the earliest Quo Vadis or Ben Hur, the religious picture has packed them in and even in this materialistic age still does.

Those interested in religion, and even those interested in the cinema, have become increasingly despondent about this. It was not, we felt, Cecil B. DeMille's ingredients of sex and scripture that were really going to fire people with the love of God. Indeed, most of the really good religious films have not been found among the great religious epics, though the most recent Ben Hur was pretty good of its kind. There have been pictures like Monsieur Vincent which, by the marvellous acting of Pierre Fresnay as St. Vincent de Paul and the solid worth of its presentation, really did make one feel that it was possible to recognise a saint when one met him. Or they have been raw, angry pictures like Cielo Sulla Palude, whose portrayal of St. Maria Goretti's ordeal was so realistic that it got itself banned from Ireland, simply for telling the facts of that most savage of stories. Or they have been challenging, provocative movies like Leon Morin, Priest, which brought into contemporary terms the problem of the priesthood in the modern world.

Recently, two major films have been made on the gospel story itself. It was perhaps hardly fair to The Greatest Story Ever Told that we saw it after we had seen (at the London Film Festival) Pier Paolo Pasolini's incomparably better The Gospel According to St. Matthew. The great ponderous American epic had a far less chance to shine beside the Italian work than had there been nothing but the disastrous King of Kings with which to compare it.

The two films—the one made in America by George Stevens at enormous cost and on an enormous scale with a vast cast of famous names, the other made in Italy at a fraction of the cost and on a scale which can almost be described as domestic—provide almost every contrast that one might care to make. And to my mind, excellent through the intentions of the Hollywood film undeniably are, there is absolutely no doubt that the Italian is not only a much better film, artistically and technically, but also certainly the more authentically religious work, for all that its director is an Italian communist! [author's italics]

That this judgment is not entirely personal prejudice is demonstrated by the fact that not only did the International Catholic Office of the Cinema (OCIC) award its prize to Pasolini's film, but the assembled officers of OCIC, gathered from all over the world in Assisi for their general annual meeting, gave it the Grand Prix, thus making it clear that they considered this picture to be, of all pictures produced in the year, the one which contributed most to the development of spiritual and human values, as well as being outstanding for its technical and artistic standards. Remarkable, you may well feel, that a specifically Catholic organization, meeting in Italy of all countries, felt strongly enough about a picture to make so controversial an award. But once you have seen the film, you understand exactly why this revolutionary step was taken.

The commercial cinema has been making scriptural spectaculars for something like fifty years. While we were told in advance that The Greatest Story Ever Told was going to be different, except for the skilful use of modern techniques like Panavision, Cinerama and Technicolor, it is hardly any advance on the earlier pictures. The opening sequences of the Magi and the stable are really nothing like so good as the opening sequences in Ben Hur; while the camel caravan in the desert with the Christmas card star above it is unbelievably tasteless. Dedicated moviegoers may have found themselves wondering, as I did, whether the heavily symbolic line of crucified corpses on the road taken by Mary and Joseph could have been borrowed from the final shots of Spartacus. It must be agreed that some of the most valid sequences of this very, very long film were unashamedly borrowed, and borrowed from a category of film in which American directors hardly ever put a foot wrong—the western. So we smiled, but appreciatively, when the Roman soldiers were lined up in silhouette along a bluff, in the fashion of countless Indian marauders; and the murderous charge of Herod's troops upon the Innocents at play could have been duplicated from almost any Civil War film; and both these loans were at once effective and beautiful. Which is not what one could say about the vast blown-up buildings which housed Herod or Pilate or the Ark of the Covenant—they seemed to have been lifted from the architectural excesses which loaded the second (and inferior) half of Cleopatra.

Pasolini's film, on the other hand, came again and again with a salutary shock of surprise, starting with the very first sequence. Gospel was shot in a series of episodes in which the scale was clearly deliberately reduced. With neither the money nor the facilities to embark on farflung locations, Pasolini made his picture in the rock country of his own southern Italy, as bare and as austere as Stevens's American desert, but far more intimately related to the scale of men working for their living in an unkind land. Pasolini employs no stars. His Christ is a young Spanish student with a thin, stern face, wind-blown hair and a rare, sweet smile, but his performance is allowed to be more significant than the great Swedish actor von Sydow in the American epic. Pasolini has—quite naturally, considering his own background—treated the gospel more as a divinely-inspired document of social revolution than as a great panorama of historical events—the blind see, the lame walk and, above all, the poor have the gospel preached to them.

When we come to what Stevens made into great set-pieces—the entry into Jerusalem or the Last Supper—Pasolini makes them as domestic as he can. I have never seen any representation of the Last Supper which made one feel so immediately "This is how it must have been"—a gathering of tired men who love each other sit down to a meal in a humble room and, suddenly, become aware that this is something quite different from anything that has ever happened before.

And this, surely, is the true aim of a religious picture—that it should disconcert and dislocate the comfortable preconceptions of the believer and, at the same time, make the unbeliever feel that after all there is something valid and important in a story that he has dismissed as a pious convention. It was not for nothing that this intelligent and sensitive Italian Marxist dedicated his picture to "the memory of good Pope John" who achieved very much the same kind of breakthrough to the world, making even the most cynical acknowledge the tremendous power of sheer goodness and charity.

In my opinion, The Gospel According to St. Matthew is incomparably the most effective picture ever made on a scriptural theme, and it reduces the grandiose Greatest Story Ever Told, however good its intentions may have been, to the proportions of a conventional "holy picture."