We are in a bleak desert under a clear sky; there are ruins, and what appears to be some scaffolding. Faintly ominous music, with twanging electric guitars, rises; the camera roams around the ruins. The tempo increases as the appearance of a plume of dust heralds the arrival of a battered second-hand bus. People whom we can not unjustifiably describe as a bunch of hippies pile off the bus and start unloading costumes and props, almost instinctively separating into different cliques as they do so; one member of the group (Carl Anderson) watches all of this with mounting unease, eventually walking away from the others entirely. Finally, one man (Ted Neeley) is apparently singled out for the adoration of the others, and dressed in a white robe. The music rises, the overture finishes, and we are watching Norman Jewison’s 1973 adaptation of Lloyd-Webber and Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar.
I must confess to having a long and somewhat peculiar association with this particular show and the movie based on it. I have what you might call a faith-based background, which in my youth extended to amateur theatre, especially at Easter. For some reasons the songs from this particular film were judged especially suitable for incorporation into my local church productions, which is why some of the songs inevitably summon up images in my mind of performances by school caretakers and retired electricians in glued-on beards.
Nevertheless, we still had the soundtrack album in the house and the film itself turned up on TV most years; initially I was rather thrilled by its daring non-naturalism (we shall come back to this), but as the years went by I learned to appreciate the qualities of the songs and the performances. Nowadays it is without a doubt my favourite religiously-themed film, and the only film about the Easter story that I have any real affection for.
Usually I would say that we don’t need to worry too much about doing a synopsis for the story on this occasion… but then again perhaps we do. My understanding is that, while looking around for a new project, Rice and Lloyd-Webber hit upon the idea of doing a show called Judas Iscariot, an attempt to rehabilitate a Biblical figure with something of an image problem. They moved on from this fairly quickly, but you can see the vestiges of the concept in the way the film is structured. Judas (Anderson) gets the opening and closing numbers, after all, and it is these which set out the film’s rules of engagement.
Jesus Christ Superstar is not wholly a religious film, although if you are a person of faith you can certainly view it in that way. Instead, it is much more preoccupied with the personal and the political, as Judas makes clear in the film’s first big song, ‘Heaven On Their Minds’: he is a social activist, a fiercely angry man. He is filled with deep disquiet at the cult of personality he sees springing up around his friend Jesus, concerned at the possibility of reprisals from the local and imperial authorities. But Jesus doesn’t see it quite the same way, to Judas’ frustration and resentment.
If one takes Judas’ worldly perspective and discounts the possibility of Jesus actually being a supernatural figure, then Judas becomes a much more sympathetic figure than is usually the case; he is given a personality and motivations largely missing from Biblical accounts. (Indeed, the film has much in common with the apocryphal Gnostic Gospel according to Judas, which also attempts to set the story straight.) The great success of Jesus Christ Superstar lies in the way it succeeds in bringing to life characters who tend to be rather one-dimensional in most tellings of this story – mainly Jesus and Judas, but to a lesser extent also Mary Magdalene (Yvonne Elliman) and Pontius Pilate (Barry Dennen) – it was Dennen who first interested Jewison in doing a film of this show, after giving him a copy of the original album while they were working together on Fiddler on the Roof.
It’s a very interesting take on the material which synergises extremely well with the non-naturalistic telling of the story. The device of the play-within-the-film is more or less adhered to (although there’s a sequence in which Judas is pursued across the desert by the tanks of the Israeli army, who didn’t appear to be on the bus at the start), and there’s a hip sort of anachronism going on – Roman soldiers wear shiny chrome helmets and carry Uzis, the merchants at the temple are selling cannabis. Then again, the general sensibility of the film is very much of the Age of Aquarius, the songs showing influences ranging from heavy metal to comic ragtime pastiche.
The most important thing with a musical, of course, is whether the songs are any good. Well, I think Jesus Christ Superstar has more than its share of bangers, which is all the more impressive considering it is sung-through and the songs have to do most of the storytelling. Carl Anderson is without a doubt the funkiest Iscariot in cinema history, delivering killer performances of his two big numbers, while I think Ted Neeley is just as good as Jesus – I know some people consider him the worst Jesus in cinema history, but I can’t imagine why: his big solo song is probably ‘Gethsemane’, which he absolutely nails. Elsewhere there are songs like ‘Could We Start Again, Please?’, as lovely an expression of regret as one could hope to hear, and ‘I Don’t Know How To Love Him’, which has a melody so beautiful it travelled back in time from Lloyd-Webber’s mind and ended up in a Mendelsohn concerto.
You might consider all of this a bit irreverent, possibly even inappropriately so. (There’s certainly a line about the Prophet Mohammed in one of the songs it would take a brave man to write nowadays.) Some Christian groups have accused the film of verging on the heretical, given its readiness to challenge the way these characters are traditionally presented, and its ambiguous approach to the more supernatural elements of the story. The film depicts the crucifixion but not the resurrection, and ends with a curiously obscure coda: the cast, back in their original clothing, board the bus to depart – only Dennen, Elliman and Anderson noticing that Neeley has seemingly disappeared. But if nothing else this is true to the apparent conception of the film, which was to make something which, while not an explicitly Christian film, is certainly a sympathetic one. Certainly it has moments which are genuinely poignant and moving, unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a standard Biblical epic.
(Of course, if we’re talking about 1973 films about what is essentially a religious sacrifice, with a strong musical element, then we’re obliged to mention Jesus Christ Superstar in the same breath as The Wicker Man. This really is a sacriligious idea, of course – and yet I don’t think it’s as much of a stretch as it sounds. There’s the music, the ambiguous – or at least unresolved – ending, and a strangely similar moment in which the protagonist receives their role and is garbed as such by the rest of the cast. Of course it could just be me.)