Production
The film features scenes of Jesus' miracles and his Sermon on the Mount (shot with many thousands of extras), as well as a scene where Jesus visits John the Baptist in his dungeon during his imprisonment by Herod Antipas. Ray staged the scene in such a way that John the Baptist must crawl up an incline inside the dungeon, holding out his hand to reach for Jesus' hand: a vivid example of Ray's architectural sense of composition and visual drama (Ray had studied under Frank Lloyd Wright to become an architect).
Nicholas Ray's direction balances majestic spectacle with more mundane and small-scaled drama such as Jesus' relationship with His mother and the apostles. The Sermon on the Mount sequence is nearly at the exact center of the film, conveying the core moral and spiritual message of Jesus, which plays a pivotal role in the subplot of Barabbas's conflicted attitude towards Jesus.
King of Kings is also memorable for the music score by composer Miklós Rózsa, which was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. Rózsa's most recent work at the time was the score for MGM's hugely successful religious epic Ben-Hur (1959), for which he won his third Oscar. Rózsa composed the scores for many of MGM's epic films, including Quo Vadis? (1951) and El Cid (which he scored the same year as King of Kings).
The production was photographed in Technirama by Manuel Berenguer, Milton R. Krasner and Franz Planer, and was presented in 70mm Super Technirama at selected first-run engagements. It was the first film of the life of Christ to be photographed in 70mm, which was not in use when previous films about the same subject had been made. The previous film version of Christ's life, a church-sponsored film called Day of Triumph, had been filmed in standard "spherical" widescreen in 1954 by much the same people who filmed television's The Living Christ Series.
Not credited at the time, Orson Welles did the voiceover of the narration, written by Ray Bradbury. Welles insisted on pronouncing the word "apostles" with a hard "t".
Read more about this topic: King Of Kings (1961 film)
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