“It’s a remarkable film”: the 1961 epic Martin Scorsese saw 20 years too late and still called a “revelation”
Martin Scorsese is a busy guy. With many iconic movies to his name (don’t forget all of his documentaries, too), it’s a wonder he has any time to actually sit down and watch films in his spare time.
Before he was one of Hollywood’s most well-respected filmmakers, Scorsese studied cinema at NYU, but by this point, he’d already made his first amateur short film, Vesuvius VI at just 17, then came What’s a Nice Girl like You Doing in a Place like This?, his first proper short as a film student, paving the way for his eventual first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, in 1967.
Clearly, the 1960s were an incredibly pivotal decade for Scorsese, who was immersing himself in the art of cinema as much as he could, but being so busy meant he couldn’t watch everything, and one movie from this era that he missed was Barabbas, a two-and-a-half-hour historical epic from Richard Fleischer, dealing with one of Scorsese’s favourite themes: religion.
The filmmaker has long explored religion within his work, even dedicating a whole, albeit controversial, movie to Jesus’ life with The Last Temptation of Christ. Even in his crime dramas and gritty visions of contemporary New York, religion usually finds a way to creep in, as evidenced by the likes of Mean Streets.
It’s surprising, then, that it took 20 years for Scorsese to see this religious monolith of a film, but he got there eventually, describing it as a “revelation” that “I only saw it in 1981”.
He wrote, “[It] was based on a book by a Danish author who won a Nobel Prize [Pär Lagerkvist]. I found it very moving because of Barabbas’ struggle to understand why he was spared and what God wanted from him, until he ends up being crucified himself. In the struggle of his character to transcend through spirituality, I found that it’s probably one of the best performances Anthony Quinn has ever given.”
Quinn played Barabbas, a figure from the ‘New Testament’ who was pardoned by Pontius Pilate after a crowd picked him over Jesus, despite being a murderer. A controversial figure, of course, he surely wasn’t easy to play, but Scorsese was enamoured by Quinn’s performance, adding, “It’s a remarkable film about a man trying to find himself”.
Fleischer’s film even shot the crucifixion scene during a real solar eclipse to replicate the ‘crucifixion darkness’ anomaly, which supposedly occurred when Jesus was put on the cross. This attention to detail made the film nothing short of impressive, and Scorsese surely kicked himself for not seeing it sooner.
There’s no way you can watch every film as it comes out, though, and that’s the real joy of cinema, where you discover gems that have been hidden in plain sight, decades on from when they were first released, never knowing what genius you’re going to stumble upon. Of course, for Scorsese it was a religious epic, something that undoubtedly came to shape his approach to making The Last Temptation of Christ.
