Jesus of Nazareth

United Kingdom, Italy

1977

382 Min

Color

1.33:1

English

Currently 3.3/5 Stars.
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EXEC Lew Grade, Bernard J. Kingham

SCR Anthony Burgess, David Butler, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Franco Zeffirelli

DP Armando Nannuzzi, David Watkin

CAST Robert Powell, Anne Bancroft, Ernest Borgnine, Claudia Cardinale, James Farentino, Ian McShane, Christopher Plummer, Michael York, Olivia Hussey, Tony Vogel, John Duttine, Jonathan Muller, Sergio Nicolai, John Eastham, Valentina Cortese, James Earl Jones, Stacy Keach, Tony Lo Bianco, James Mason, Laurence Olivier, Donald Pleasence, Anthony Quinn, Fernando Rey, Ralph Richardson, Rod Steiger, Peter Ustinov, Cyril Cusack, Ian Holm, Yorgo Voyagis, Ian Bannen, Oliver Tobias, Simon MacCorkindale

Italian director Franco Zeffirelli started out as an actor in the stage productions of Luchino Visconti, then worked as an assistant on several Visconti-directed films. After World War II, Zeffirelli launched a career designing, costuming, and directing operas, a field of entertainment to which he’d return periodically throughout his life and which led to his first directorial credit, the Swiss-produced filmization La Boheme (1965). Zeffirelli’s reputation in the 1960s rested on his boisterous, non-traditional movie versions of Shakespeare. He directed Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in a lusty adaptation of Taming of the Shrew (1967), then became an icon for the Youth Movement by casting 17-year-old Leonard Whiting and 15-year-old Olivia Hussey in Romeo and Juliet (1968). Zeffirelli’s eye for visual richness served him well in the opulent Brother Sun/Sister Moon (1973), a romanticized account of Francis of Assisi. Some of Zeffirelli’s later American films were unworthy of his talents… read more

Italian director Franco Zeffirelli started out as an actor in the stage productions of Luchino Visconti, then worked as an assistant on several Visconti-directed films. After World War II, Zeffirelli launched a career designing, costuming, and directing operas, a field of entertainment to which he’d return periodically throughout his life and which led to his first directorial credit, the Swiss-produced filmization La Boheme (1965). Zeffirelli’s reputation in the 1960s rested on his boisterous, non-traditional movie versions of Shakespeare. He directed Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in a lusty adaptation of Taming of the Shrew (1967), then became an icon for the Youth Movement by casting 17-year-old Leonard Whiting and 15-year-old Olivia Hussey in Romeo and Juliet (1968). Zeffirelli’s eye for visual richness served him well in the opulent Brother Sun/Sister Moon (1973), a romanticized account of Francis of Assisi. Some of Zeffirelli’s later American films were unworthy of his talents, though he made the most of the emotional possibilities of The Champ (1979) and actually helped Brooke Shields pass as an actress in the otherwise lachrymose Endless Love (1981). The director found himself in the center of a controversy upon finishing the expensive Euro-American TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth; certain religious activists, upset that the ads promised a “human” look at Jesus, forced several sponsors to withdraw their advertising from the telecast. (The “scandal” proved groundless, since Zeffirelli’s Jesus was one of the most reverently accurate ever seen in films.) Zeffirelli has been represented by his televised stagings of operas, many of which have shown up on American public television. And in 1990, Franco Zeffirelli returned to Shakespeare for an all-star film version of Hamlet, wherein the “surprise” was not so much Mel Gibson’s superb rendition of the title role as the fact that this was the first movie Hamlet that looked like it was actually taking place in 12th century Denmark. —allmovie.com

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