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Simply Perfect

Fresh and Exciting

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

"Barabbas" is an American/Italian English-language movie directed by Academy Award winner Richard Fleischer, member of the famous Fleischer clan. The screenplay is by Christopher Fry, who adapted Pär Lagerkvist's novel for this movie here. The film is listed on IMDb as a prequel to John Huston's Oscar-nominated "The Bible: In the Beginning...", maybe because Fry wrote that one as well? I am not sure. Story-wise, it is not really a prequel. Anyway, the version of "Barabbas" I watched runs for 2 hours and 12 minutes, so it is a pretty long film, even if not as long as its sequel. In my opinion, the only real reason to watch "Barabbas" is Anthony Quinn, He played his role convincingly, but the story simply could not keep me interested for long, especially not for over 2 hours. Pretty disappointing.I would recommend this one only to great fans of historic and religiously themed movies, maybe also to fans of Quinn. Then again, I like him too, but was rather underwhelmed watching his film here. The rest of the cast includes fairly known names too from its era, people who had won and been nominated for many awards during their long careers, but this film is another example of how even the greatest cast cannot make an uninteresting script work really. I certainly hoped this would be better judging from its IMDb rating. But it really is not. Watch something else instead. Not recommended, unless you are a Quinn completionist. You also do not need to see this one here if you play on watching the sequel I mentioned earlier in my review. That one does not even include Quinn, so connections are almost non-existent, story-wise as well.

I, of all people, know that it is unfair to compare a movie to a book. Since this film was viewed as an extension of a book study, it's hard not to do so. So I will try to be fair. I believe that Par Lagerqvist's work has an overwhelming existentialist vent to it. Barrabas witnesses the Crucifixion. He can do this because he has been spared his life due to the fact that once a year, a prisoner can be pardoned. Of course, the people call for him and reject Christ. All this follows the plot and Barabbas find himself back in his old ways. He is a subversive, but really all about himself. The book was written in 1951 by a man who had rejected Christianity. The problem with the movie is that it sucks so much humanity out of its main character. The subtle moments that show he is on a course of self discovery, don't, for me, match the book's character. I also found the whole gladiator thing, which never appears in the book, to be strictly fodder for the lowest common denominator. It is probably because this was competing with the other Biblical epics of that time. I will give Jack Palance credit. He is about as mean spirited as anyone ever in film, a true psychotic presence with his almost maniacal grin. I think at that point the subtleties went out the window. It's not a terrible movie (it's quite decent in its own way), but I think with a director and some writers that could have embraced the novel a bit more (and kept the original characters as they are described) and not bowed to popular culture, it would have been much better.

The success of films like "The Robe" (based on a novel by Lloyd Douglas) and "Quo Vadis?" (based on a novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz) had Hollywood producers scouring the libraries and the bookshops for other novels about the life of Christ and the early Church that could be turned into quasi-Biblical epics. Lew Wallace's "Ben-Hur" must have seemed a natural for this treatment, and the resulting film is one of the greatest epics ever made, but there were some more obscure entries in the cycle such as the eccentric "The Silver Chalice". "Barabbas" was based on a novel by the Swedish writer Pär Lagerkvist, a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. The gospels do not tell us very much about Barabbas, the man released by Pontius Pilate in preference to Jesus, except that he was a criminal of some sort. The four evangelists cannot even agree on the nature of his crimes; Mark and Luke accuse him of rebellion and murder, John of robbery, while Matthew simply calls him a "notorious prisoner". In Lagerkvist's account he resumes his criminal career after his release, is recaptured and condemned to work as a slave in the sulphur mines of Sicily, and later becomes a gladiator. (And what Roman epic would be complete without gladiators?)When Monty Python's controversial "Life of Brian" was attacked for allegedly ridiculing Christianity, the Pythons claimed that their satire was not aimed at Christ's teaching but at grandiose, excessively reverential religious epics. Their critics may have dismissed this claim as disingenuous, but "Barabbas" strikes me as precisely the sort of film the Pythons were sending up. The script was written by the then-famous dramatist Christopher Fry and although it is not in verse, unlike most of Fry's stage plays, the dialogue often seems heavy and ponderous. As a practising Pythonist of long standing I kept hearing echoes of "Brian" throughout; during the release scene I was expecting the crowd to shout "Welease Bawabbas! He's a wobber and a wapist!" When Barabbas' ex- girlfriend Rachel, who has become a Christian, is stoned to death for blasphemy, I wondered if she had committed the sin of remarking "That piece of fish is good enough for Jehovah!"And yet, despite its tendency to slide into unintentional self-parody, this is not altogether a bad film. It was directed by Richard Fleischer, a director whose films varied in quality but who could generally come up with something original. He worked in virtually every movie genre known to Hollywood, and when he made two films in the same genre was careful not to repeat himself. Thus his two science-fiction films, the steampunk "20,000 Leagues under the Sea" and the psychedelic "Fantastic Voyage" are nothing like one another, and his "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing" and "10, Rillington Place" are about as dissimilar as it is possible for two based-on-fact historical crime dramas to be. Fleischer had made a previous epic, "The Vikings", but this mediaeval adventure story is very different to "Barabbas". Many epics were noted for their brilliant colour- by the fifties a black-and-white epic was virtually unthinkable- but "Barabbas" is sombre in tone with dull, muted colours. It does, however, include moments of spectacle, including a splendid duel in the arena and a crucifixion scene shot during a real eclipse of the sun. The film's other great strength is the performance of Anthony Quinn in the title role. As conceived by Lagerkvist, Barabbas is a man troubled by the implications of his unexpected reprieve from death. He recognises Christ as somebody special but does not, except at the very end of the film, fully accept the truth of Christianity, even though he is befriended by a Christian prisoner while in the mines. Quinn plays the role with a blazing sincerity which sets him apart from many leading men in films of this nature; Paul Newman, for example, gave one of his worst performances in "The Silver Chalice", and Richard Burton is hardly at his best in "The Robe". Jack Palance, who was about the only watchable thing about "The Silver Chalice", is also good here as the arrogant and sadistic gladiator Torvald who fights Barabbas in the arena. Torvald fights from a chariot, in a scene obviously influenced by the chariot race in "Ben-Hur".(Incidentally, I wonder why Lagerkvist gave the common Scandinavian Christian name "Torvald" to one of his characters; this struck me as the equivalent of a British novelist calling a Roman gladiator "Bill" or "Harry". Admittedly, the name, which incorporates that of the pagan god Thor, could have been used in pre-Christian times, but it is unlikely that someone from Scandinavia, to the Romans a little-known land far outside their empire, could have made his way to Rome)."Barabbas" is not the best-known of the quasi- Biblical epics, although it has been kept in the public eye by occasional showings over the Easter holidays. It cannot compare in quality with something like "Ben- Hur", but Quinn's acting and Fleischer's directorial touches give it a certain quality which lifts it above the likes of the ludicrous "Silver Chalice". 6/10

Murkily-developed Biblical epic is long though not lumbering. Anthony Quinn goes through a grueling series of events as Barabbas, a hard-drinking thief and womanizer in Jerusalem who was spared death when Jesus Christ was chosen to take his place on the cross. Soon convicted on other charges, bad-tempered Barabbas slaved for decades in the hellish sulfur mines before being thrown into the gladiator arena, still spiritually torn over his religious vocation. Based on the Nobel-Prize winning novel by Pär Lagerkvist, this (rather melodramatic) 'expansion' from the Gospel of Mark is robotic instead of robust. Still, the momentum here for each new chapter in Barabbas' life is presented with tacky grandeur, and the picture manages to sweep the audience up in a theatrical fervor which is entertaining, if gaudy. **1/2 from ****