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9 Democratic Vista: The Greatest Story Ever Told
- University of Wisconsin Press
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9 Democratic Vista The Greatest Story Ever Told Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) —Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” In December 1958, while still shooting The Diary of Anne Frank, and after a long series of negotiations, George Stevens Productions contracted with Twentieth Century Fox again, this time to produce and direct The Greatest Story Ever Told, an adaptation of Fulton Oursler’s 1949 book of the same name. The relationship between the two films is based on more than simply their simultaneity in Stevens’s career. The Greatest Story Ever Told was a logical next step after The Diary of Anne Frank in the evolution of his postwar aesthetic; it was another way that Stevens continued to create art from his experiences in the war. His view of Dachau left an indelible imprint that seemed to drive his aesthetic forward to the everlarger expression, as if he were trying to gain on the enormity of lifechanging images he saw in the war. He filmed the story of Anne Frank as one of the most significant episodes of the twentieth century. As his friend Frank Capra later put it, Stevens thought of his experiences 269 at Dachau when he imagined filming a story of Jesus’ message: that human beings should embrace one another instead of putting each other to death for their differences. The story of Jesus was the logical culmination of Stevens’s postwar vision—as if something he could call the “greatest story” could be his only destination. The Greatest Story Ever Told, after all, was not his only “religious” postwar film; for Stevens, God’s grandeur is evident in Shane’s large vistas—revered by the film’s characters and spectators. Stevens and Ivan Moffat had just begun writing a script for The Greatest Story Ever Told when they met for lunch at the Brown Derby in early December 1960 and Stevens told Moffat that the film would never become a comic book version of Jesus’ life. That is, it would not follow suit with the recent spate of Biblical epics produced in Hollywood during the 1950s. Instead, his would be reverent, and universal, a word he often employed when he thought about the masses he would attract to his film. The Greatest Story Ever Told would be the ultimate movie on Jesus. Though it would refrain from making a spectacle of itself, after his film on Jesus there would be no need to make another. Two years later, with a completed script in hand—the only time in his career that Stevens received actual screenwriter credit—he took cast and crew and embarked on location shooting in Page, Arizona. Then the unthinkable —but in hindsight the logical—occurred: over the next three years, slowly but with unwavering momentum, Stevens’s great epic on Jesus began to unravel until it met an unfortunate end in movie houses. Glaringly shy of the audience Stevens imagined, The Greatest Story Ever Told took a beating from movie critics along the way. During its production , The Greatest Story Ever Told threatened to get out of hand time and again, though Stevens tried his best to curb the small disasters as they came: weather was unreasonable and unforgiving; Stevens took longer and longer to contemplate and shoot scenes; other directors were summoned to come in and shoot sequences just to bring the film in and get it finished. By February 1965, Stevens had on his hands the most stunning work of art he had ever directed and the most beautiful failure of his career. What would have been the magnum opus of his career was now his beautiful half-failure of a film. His painfully wrought rendering of the life of Jesus was an experience from which he, truthfully, never recovered . He was not at a loss for offers after that: Warren Beatty courted 270 Democratic Vista • [54.198.200.128] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:33 GMT) him for a year to direct Bonnie and Clyde; Fox offered him Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1968; he planned and then walked away from producer Sam Spiegel’s Nicholas and Alexandra in 1967, as well from directing This Property Is Condemned. Then in 1969 he directed one more film, the high profile The Only Game in Town, believing he could direct it just as he had directed comedies at RKO in the 1930s...