Guillermo del Toro and Martin Scorsese Celebrate the ‘Extraordinary Artistry’ of ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’
On Saturday, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles presented the world premiere of a new 4K restoration of George Stevens‘ “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965), one of the most ambitious and experimental of all Hollywood epics. Director Martin Scorsese, whose Film Foundation was instrumental in restoring the film (and whose “The Last Temptation of Christ” is the only biblical epic that rivals “The Greatest Story” in its audacity and complexity), provided a video introduction in which he celebrated Stevens’ masterpiece as the summation of his work.
“ The film was shot in Ultra Panavision 70 with lenses that yielded an aspect ratio of 2.76 to 1, and it was breathtaking,” Scorsese said. “But it wasn’t just the size of the image, it was the imprint of the man behind the camera who knew how to fill that frame, how to compose it. And composer seems like the right word to describe George Stevens and the extraordinary level of artistry he reached at that point in his life and career.”
Scorsese explained that when Stevens came back from World War II, his work took on a new sense of purpose and urgency in powerful works like “A Place in the Sun,” “Shane,” “Giant,” and “The Diary of Anne Frank.” “He began to pay very close attention to evil, to the greed and the hatred and the raw murderous violence that can overtake us all if we don’t all pay attention,” Scorsese said. “Those pictures are grand cinematic canvases, but they’re also urgent warnings to take care of our goodness and our love.”
Although Stevens was not a particularly religious man, he saw in Jesus Christ a way to explore those themes on their grandest scale. “‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ is the summation,” Scorsese said. “It’s the final movement of Stevens’ multi-picture symphony. Stevens chose to enact the story on a scale of mythic grandeur and timeless immensity. This picture was years in the making at a cast of thousands.” It also felt of a piece with Stevens’ Westerns thanks to the unusual choices the director made when it came to locations.
“It was set against the backdrop of the American West in locations that we normally associate with Westerns,” Scorsese said. “Death Valley, Moab, Utah, Pyramid Lake in Nevada. It’s an extraordinary idea and it was really controversial because most biblical epics up to that time been shot somewhere near the Middle East or in the Middle East.” Scorsese noted that the film was part of a trend that included Nicolas Ray’s “King of Kings” and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” that brought a new immediacy to the story of Jesus Christ. “They turned away from the conventions of the period.”
Scorsese added that the production encountered “one calamity after another” and ultimately didn’t fully realize Stevens’ vision. “ Nevertheless, Stevens put everything he had into the telling of the story of Jesus and you could feel it from the first frame to the last,” Scorsese said. “He wanted to embody the tragedy and the redemption of humanity on every level. In a way, his ambitions were so grand that it wasn’t possible to realize them fully, but the sheer intensity and artistry of the picture is moving all on its own. There’s nothing else quite like it.”
‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’Courtesy Everett Collection
Stevens’ son, filmmaker George Stevens Jr., supervised the Film Foundation’s restoration and appeared in person at the Academy Museum to introduce Guillermo del Toro, a lifelong Stevens enthusiast and Film Foundation board member who was present to deliver a 20-minute lecture on “The Greatest Story Ever Told” before the film. As a Catholic raised in Mexico, del Toro estimated that he had seen “The Greatest Story” over 20 times — and he sat with the audience in the Academy Museum to watch it again in its exquisite new restoration.
Del Toro provided rich historical context for the film, describing Stevens’ path through several epochs of filmmaking. “He lived through every era of cinema,” del Toro said before exploring Stevens’ innovations during the silent period, his wartime documentary work, his seminal post-war American epics, and the influence he had on the New Hollywood. This last topic was where del Toro’s lecture was most revelatory, as he explained why the perception of Stevens as a staid classical filmmaker is dead wrong, and that in fact Stevens was a modernist who influenced one of the most groundbreaking films of the 1960s, “Bonnie and Clyde.”
“I want to make the case today that this man influenced the New American Cinema,” del Toro said. “He influenced Martin Ritt, Warren Beatty, Terrence Malick and many more.” Del Toro gave the example of Warren Beatty studying the sound mix of “Shane” and applying its principles to the climactic shoot-out in “Bonnie and Clyde.” “Beatty was the first man that noticed ‘Shane’ was a modern film by a modern master. Stevens insisted that the percussion, the brutality of a gunshot overpowers with its violence, and Beatty understands that this is a bold decision, a bold technique.”
In discussing “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” del Toro insightfully drew parallels between Stevens’ age and our own, both in terms of world politics and upheaval in the film industry. “ His canvas became Ultra Panavision 70, with a spherical system that gave him extra space,” del Toro said. “When he shot this movie, there was a battle between TV and cinema — we’re there again — and the battle was how to get people into theaters. One of the things was spectacle. The larger formats were getting people into theaters, but very few directors really knew how to use it and how to use it expressively.”
Del Toro added that Stevens used the vast potential of the Ultra Panavision 70 frame as a tool to examine his themes with sweep and intensity. “You can find out more about an artist by their art than by sharing space and time with them,” del Toro said when explaining that “The Greatest Story Ever Told” expressed Stevens’ profoundly humanistic point of view. “This is a time and a generation that didn’t signal virtue, they practiced it. They didn’t tell you who they were, they demonstrated who they were.”
‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’Courtesy Everett Collection
“The Greatest Story Ever Told” represented a demonstration of all that Stevens had learned and felt about good and evil since liberating Dachau concentration camp during his time in the service, an experience that informed the film he made right before “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” “The Diary of Anne Frank.” “One of the questions he was trying to grapple with was that no one group crucified Jesus,” del Toro said. “We all crucified Jesus. Stevens said there was no them, it was us.”
Yet for del Toro, what stands out about “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and the rest of Stevens’ body of work is its hopefulness and faith. “He realized that art and narrative have such a high calling to tell us what we are and who we are, and that compassion and decency are our superpowers,” del Toro said. “Don’t let them lie to you that hatred is our superpower. It diminishes us, and Stevens understood this.”
Stevens only made one film after “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” the Warren Beatty vehicle “The Only Game in Town,” which got made due to Beatty’s reverence for the master director. “What would George Stevens have done after this film if given another chance at the canvas he was grappling with?” del Toro asked before closing his lecture with the memory of watching “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” “If you grow up Mexican, every Easter you saw this movie. It’s Saturday, but let’s have Easter together.”
“The Greatest Story Ever Told” premiered at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, where Guillermo del Toro presented this year’s “George Stevens Lecture on Directing”— the museum’s ongoing lecture series about the art of filmmaking. For information on future museum events, visit their website.
