Film Can Be Form of Lenten Worship

During the Lenten season, instead of giving up some token pleasure, my preference each day is to listen to Christian music and watch biblical films to get into a more spiritual mindset. While many of the old Hollywood films are not entirely accurate, they still bring the words of the Bible to life.

Most recently I watched the 1966 film, The Bible: In The Beginning, a John Huston film that took four years to make. It's perfect as a DVD because you can skip the boring parts. While I don't find much to commend the first half of the film because it is excruciatingly slow, as well as incomprehensible in parts, the approximately hour-long section on Abraham and Sarah make the film worth viewing. The section on Noah, too, is amusing, and it must have been a tough section to shoot with the animal parade. However, even though it uses animation, Evan Almighty trumps it in terms of believability in this day and age.

A New York Times review of the film when it was released had a lot of the same criticism I had -- the film is only about the first half of Genesis -- not the entire Bible -- and it has a long, bizarre and arty beginning showing the formation of the earth. Another section on the Tower of Babel and Nimrod left me wondering what it was all about. Still, the performances of George C. Scott as Abraham and Ava Gardner as Sarah are the saving graces of the film.

One of the best blogs I've seen on Bible films, a British blog called biblefilms.blogspot.com, has referenced the The Bible film numerous times. It's something of a touchstone of early Bible films, along with The Ten Commandments and The Robe, in that order.

Once I've gotten through some of the biblical films -- and there are some great modern versions, such as Jeremiah -- I'll move on to watching the Jesus films. Any but Mel Gibson's Passion, since once was enough for me for the rest of my life. It's too heavy on the S&M and too light on the Resurrection and what it all means.