Cinema: The New Pictures, Dec. 29, 1958

Bell, Book and Candle (Phoenix; Columbia). John Van Druten’s comedy about the contemporary prevalence of witches cast enough of a spell on theatergoers to give it a six-month run on Broadway. But somewhere between Broadway and Hollywood the broomstick broke down. Like the play, the picture is about a beautiful witch (Kim Novak) who decides to exchange cantrip and gramarye for love and marriage, and about the man (James Stewart) she sets out to enchant. The part is almost perfectly written for Actress Novak. The script quickly announces that as a witch she is not supposed to blush, cry, or indeed have very much expression at all. But when the heroine suddenly changes into a woman in love, Kim’s expression changes so little that the spectator may find himself wondering which was witch. And Actor Stewart seems to be overwhelmed by Actress Novak’s example. As the bewitched hero, he stumbles around most of the time with a vaguely blissful expression—rather like a comic-strip character who has just been socked by Popeye.

Fortunately, the supporting cast is unusually strong. Hermione Gingold and Elsa Lanchester make a couple of hilariously weird sisters, and Ernie Kovacs has some wonderful moments as a subnormal supernaturalist.

He Who Must Die (Kassler) is one of the most powerful religious statements the screen has made in many a year. The fact has its ironic implications. The man who made the film, a 46-year-old New Yorker named Jules Dassin, was blacklisted in Hollywood after a witness told a congressional investigating committee that he was a Communist. When he worked in the U.S., Dassin was regarded as nothing more than a capable technician of suspense (Naked City, Brute Force). Rififi, a thriller he made in France after five years without work, revealed him as a superb one. He Who Must Die, made in Crete with French capital, suggests that Director Dassin may in fact be a broadly and intensely gifted artist, one of the best in the film business.

His picture is based on The Greek Passion, a novel of spiritual ideas and earthy instances (TIME, Jan. 11, 1954), in which Nikos Kazantzakis retold the story of Christ’s Passion as a modern occasion. The scene is set in a Greek village that has grown rich and careful under the tolerant Turkish dominion. As the story begins, everybody in town crowds into the tiny church to hear the priest appoint the leading parts in a Passion play,* to be presented on the following Easter. The choices are almost too shrewd. Mary Magdalen is the village whore. Judas is a well-known hell raiser and general bad lot. St. Peter is the village postman. St. John is the gentle, warmhearted son of the richest man in town. Christ is a shepherd, a stammering and shy man, pure and natural in character but illiterate and naive.

The actors, unsophisticated souls, are overwhelmed at the thought of the parts they must play. They feel a painful sense of unworthiness. But they have been elected to a task more terrible than they imagine. Suddenly it happens that these latter-day saints are called upon to play their roles in real life.

The survivors of a Turkish massacre, a rout of starving Christians, come staggering into the town square. “[We need] land,” their priest implores. “Land in which to put forth roots! Give us your wasteland …” But the priest of the village, fearing the wrath of the Turk, drives them away into the hills, where in desperation they decide to settle, even if it means to starve. Many of the villagers are shocked by the priest’s un-Christian gesture, but only the actors, who have a special reason “to be mindful of their spiritual responsibilities, are moved to offer Christian charity. Three of the appointed saints are caught stealing grain for the refugees. The St. John cries out in their behalf: “If Jesus returned to earth, he would be crucified again.” The Christ dies for them.

The film is fidgety with small faults. Yet all the faults are defects of execution, not of conception, and though they tend to slubber the texture of the film, they do not impair its intensity and radiance. The actors, with few exceptions, seem to have been struck, like the actors in the story, with the moral and spiritual challenge of their roles; they play with a plain honesty that compels belief, even in some highly improbable scenes. Even the villagers whom Dassin hired as extras seem to have been caught up in the general fervor; the mass scenes, shot against the bright, Biblical bareness of the Cretan hills, are perhaps the most spontaneous and exciting since the street riots in Open City. But in frame after frame what strikes the senses and the spirit most powerfully is the raw, unmitigated light that streams from the screen, as if from the incandescent core of an essential religious experience.

*For news of another sort of Passion-play story, see BOOKS.