Barabbas

TCM ran a bunch of religious-themed movies on Easter, and I recorded a couple that I hadn't done posts on yet. One of those was Barabbas.

Anthony Quinn stars as Barabbas, a name Christians will recognize from one key scene in the Gospels. Jesus is set to be crucified during Passover, and Roman governor Pontius Pilate (Arthur Kennedy) knows of the old Jewish tradition that during the Passover season, one of the condemned is to be set free. So he offers the Jews a choice: Jesus, or the thief and murderer Barabbas. The crowd chooses to pardon Barabbas, leaving Jesus to be crucified.

Barabbas goes home to his girlfriend Rachel (Silvana Mangano), and her mother Sara (Katy Jurado). They actually believe in Jesus and that he's going to rise again on the third day, something Barabbas thinks is nonsense. And yet, come the third day, Jesus has disappeared from his tomb! Barabbas doesn't know what to think or do.

Unfortunately for him, opinion among the early Christians is sharply divided on how to treat him. There's a lot of ostracism of both him and Rachel, and Rachel eventually gets stoned to death, while Barabbas gets arrested by the Romans. They can't execute him because of the prior pardon, so instead they send him to the sulfur mines in Sicily.

The sulfur mines are a brutal life, as the chemicals are blinding, and the lack of light in the mines will blind them anyway if they come back out to the light. Never mind the back-breaking labor. Somehow, Barabbas is able to survive for ages, much longer than any of the other slaves, and is eventually chained to Sahak (Vittorio Gassman). When he saves Sahak during a mine explosion, he gets his sentence commuted to less back-breaking work farming.

It's there that he meets Julia (Valentina Cortese) and her husband Rufio, the two procuring Barabbas and Sahak and making them gladiators in Rome. There, Barabbas meets many more Christians, who by now seem amazed to meet somebody who was actually in the presence of Jesus. But being a gladiator is tough, and dealing with Torvald (Jack Palance), the best gladiator of them all, isn't going to be easy.

Barabbas is an interesting movie that's not without its flaws. Quinn is quite good as the man who has a pretty severe crisis of faith, which frankly would be understandable if your life was spared so somebody else could be executed. He also has difficulty comprehending how the Christians can still have their faith especially in light of the way the Romans treat them. Palance is good as the villain, looking like he's having loads of fun. Everybody else is adequate, getting their scenes and then departing from the movie since this is all about Barabbas.

The big problem I had with the movie is in part due to its production. Dino de Laurentiis produced, with a multinational cast and filming locations around Italy. Valentina Cortese, when she was in Day for Night a dozen years later, had a line about how Fellini (not the director here, but this is I think indicative of Italian movies) let the actors speak numbers and then do their dialogue in post-production. All of the dialogue here had the distinct feeling of having been done in post, and as such feels really detached from the rest of the movie. For some reason more than a lot of other movies, I found it really jarring here.

Overall, though, Barabbas is certainly worth a watch. It's available on DVD too.