June 18, 1949—Abel Gance, creator of a film that took a potshot at a Renaissance Pope, was given a private audience with a more recent successor of St. Peter, Pius XII, in the Vatican, to discuss the French cinema pioneer’s dream project: La Divine Tragedie (The Divine Tragedy), a biopic of the life of Christ.
No problems appear to have been stirred by the meeting between dissenter and pontiff. All incessant energy, Gance was leaving no stone unturned in his effort to consult every religious figure who might help shed light on Jesus—and, in the process, help him make a film whose epic scope and importance would likely have exceeded that of his 1927 silent classic, Napoleon.
Unfortunately, for reasons having nothing to do with Pius’ attitude toward the film, Gance’s best-laid plans fell apart 14 months after the papal audience. The failure all had to do with the third man in that room, producer Georges de la Grandiere, who failed to provide the financial backing he had promised. Without the money, Gance was forced to cancel the project, though he continued to work on treatments for it, and hope against hope, well into his mid-80s.
The road to film glory is littered with all too many classics that died along the way, including by the likes of:
* Josef von Sternberg, whose 1937 adaptation of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius collapsed after a month of shooting, ostensibly because of an auto accident involving Merle Oberon, but more likely because producer Alexander Korda tired of the incessant bickering between the director and his star, Charles Laughton.
* David Lean, whose reexamination of the mutiny on the Bounty fell apart because of financing issues in the late ‘70s, and whose last project, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, was abandoned when the director died in 1991, six weeks before principal photography was about to begin.
* Orson Welles, who deserves to have a whole wing for The Ones That Got Away, including a documentary taken out of his hands (It’s All True), as well as several other films that perished on the vine (Don Quixote, The Other Side of the Wind, The Cradle Will Rock, The Big Brass Ring).
But I find Gance’s failure to get his project launched a tragedy of its own. With his strength as a technical innovator (he pioneered Polyvision, a triptych or three-panel process, as well as stereo sound effects for Napoleon) and the nature of his own background, The Divine Tragedy might have overcome the difficulties that, in one way or another, ensnared others daring or foolhardy enough to tackle the life of Christ, including Cecil B. DeMille, Nicholas Ray, George Stevens, Martin Scorsese, and—of course!—Mel Gibson.
World War II—and especially the dropping of the atomic bomb—gave greater urgency to Gance’s quest to make this film. "Apart from the fact that La Divine Tragedie will be the crowning achievement of my life's work,” he noted, “my interest in making it derives from the conviction that showing such a film to the masses would release such a will for peace as would save humanity from impending cataclysm."
The project might also have attracted the maestro of what he called “the music of light” because of comparatively aesthetic reasons: his need to find a modern counterpart to the Biblical verse, “In the beginning was the Word….” His synopsis of the project featured a vividly cinematic restatement of this: “It is through the Christ and through his Passion that the image can achieve the Verb.”
In the postwar period, the director found himself longing for something distinctly old-fashioned: a miracle. He certainly needed something on that order to revive his former reputation as France’s answer to D.W. Griffith. For someone with such socialist and pacifist instincts embodied in his films, he also embraced, at one point or another, militaristic figures: from right to left, Mussolini, Franco, DeGaulle, and Mao Tse-Tung. The brilliant director was increasingly seen as a has-been, and even an opportunist.
In filming Lucrece Borgia (1935), Gance had committed two sins that would have been regarded as egregious by the Catholic Church. Bad enough that this tale of corruption in Renaissance Italy had resorted to full-frontal female nudity at a time when this ran against censorship codes of the time. But, as one of the plot’s villains, he had also used the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI.
Why, with this background, would the Holy Father have even given Gance the time of day? Yes, Pius might have been impressed by the director’s assurances of good faith. As a leader whose silence on the Nazis had called into question whose good intentions during the war, he might have felt sympathy for another suffering from ostracism.
But I think another factor might have lent Gance credibility in the eyes of the Pope: the director’s backing by the Office Familiale de Documentation Artistique, an anti-communist Catholic organization. (Pius was a fierce anti-communist.)
Anti-Semitism has sometimes been lodged against films about Christ (see, of course, Mel Gibson). Gance, however, might have been able to sidestep this. In addition to checking in with the pope, he had also consulted with the newly established l’Amitie Judeo-Chretienne de France about the script. Moreover, his own secret family history (he was the illegitimate son of a Jewish physician) would have rendered him more sympathetic to Jewish sensibilities.
As the producer of Monsieur Vincent, a treatment of the life of St. Vincent de Paul that won a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Georges de la Grandiere might have seemed an excellent choice to help get Gance’s project made. But, after extensive scouting of locations, vetting of actors (American actress Irene Dunne, a devout Roman Catholic, agreed to play Mary), and six scripts that reduced the film's running time from 6 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours, it all came apart in August 1950.
No problems appear to have been stirred by the meeting between dissenter and pontiff. All incessant energy, Gance was leaving no stone unturned in his effort to consult every religious figure who might help shed light on Jesus—and, in the process, help him make a film whose epic scope and importance would likely have exceeded that of his 1927 silent classic, Napoleon.
Unfortunately, for reasons having nothing to do with Pius’ attitude toward the film, Gance’s best-laid plans fell apart 14 months after the papal audience. The failure all had to do with the third man in that room, producer Georges de la Grandiere, who failed to provide the financial backing he had promised. Without the money, Gance was forced to cancel the project, though he continued to work on treatments for it, and hope against hope, well into his mid-80s.
The road to film glory is littered with all too many classics that died along the way, including by the likes of:
* Josef von Sternberg, whose 1937 adaptation of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius collapsed after a month of shooting, ostensibly because of an auto accident involving Merle Oberon, but more likely because producer Alexander Korda tired of the incessant bickering between the director and his star, Charles Laughton.
* David Lean, whose reexamination of the mutiny on the Bounty fell apart because of financing issues in the late ‘70s, and whose last project, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, was abandoned when the director died in 1991, six weeks before principal photography was about to begin.
* Orson Welles, who deserves to have a whole wing for The Ones That Got Away, including a documentary taken out of his hands (It’s All True), as well as several other films that perished on the vine (Don Quixote, The Other Side of the Wind, The Cradle Will Rock, The Big Brass Ring).
But I find Gance’s failure to get his project launched a tragedy of its own. With his strength as a technical innovator (he pioneered Polyvision, a triptych or three-panel process, as well as stereo sound effects for Napoleon) and the nature of his own background, The Divine Tragedy might have overcome the difficulties that, in one way or another, ensnared others daring or foolhardy enough to tackle the life of Christ, including Cecil B. DeMille, Nicholas Ray, George Stevens, Martin Scorsese, and—of course!—Mel Gibson.
World War II—and especially the dropping of the atomic bomb—gave greater urgency to Gance’s quest to make this film. "Apart from the fact that La Divine Tragedie will be the crowning achievement of my life's work,” he noted, “my interest in making it derives from the conviction that showing such a film to the masses would release such a will for peace as would save humanity from impending cataclysm."
The project might also have attracted the maestro of what he called “the music of light” because of comparatively aesthetic reasons: his need to find a modern counterpart to the Biblical verse, “In the beginning was the Word….” His synopsis of the project featured a vividly cinematic restatement of this: “It is through the Christ and through his Passion that the image can achieve the Verb.”
In the postwar period, the director found himself longing for something distinctly old-fashioned: a miracle. He certainly needed something on that order to revive his former reputation as France’s answer to D.W. Griffith. For someone with such socialist and pacifist instincts embodied in his films, he also embraced, at one point or another, militaristic figures: from right to left, Mussolini, Franco, DeGaulle, and Mao Tse-Tung. The brilliant director was increasingly seen as a has-been, and even an opportunist.
In filming Lucrece Borgia (1935), Gance had committed two sins that would have been regarded as egregious by the Catholic Church. Bad enough that this tale of corruption in Renaissance Italy had resorted to full-frontal female nudity at a time when this ran against censorship codes of the time. But, as one of the plot’s villains, he had also used the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI.
Why, with this background, would the Holy Father have even given Gance the time of day? Yes, Pius might have been impressed by the director’s assurances of good faith. As a leader whose silence on the Nazis had called into question whose good intentions during the war, he might have felt sympathy for another suffering from ostracism.
But I think another factor might have lent Gance credibility in the eyes of the Pope: the director’s backing by the Office Familiale de Documentation Artistique, an anti-communist Catholic organization. (Pius was a fierce anti-communist.)
Anti-Semitism has sometimes been lodged against films about Christ (see, of course, Mel Gibson). Gance, however, might have been able to sidestep this. In addition to checking in with the pope, he had also consulted with the newly established l’Amitie Judeo-Chretienne de France about the script. Moreover, his own secret family history (he was the illegitimate son of a Jewish physician) would have rendered him more sympathetic to Jewish sensibilities.
As the producer of Monsieur Vincent, a treatment of the life of St. Vincent de Paul that won a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Georges de la Grandiere might have seemed an excellent choice to help get Gance’s project made. But, after extensive scouting of locations, vetting of actors (American actress Irene Dunne, a devout Roman Catholic, agreed to play Mary), and six scripts that reduced the film's running time from 6 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours, it all came apart in August 1950.
Gance did not give up entirely on his dream movie, but his efforts on the project, extending into the 1970s, became increasingly more feeble with age. He was lucky to revive his career at all after a 10-year hiatus from the screen.
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