Golgotha

Robert Le Vigan and Harry Baur

Suffering through a surfeit of holiday cheer, as I hope you are dear reader, I felt the need to redress by taking a sizable stick to a Biblical picture and Julian Duvivier's Golgotha provided the opportunity. A 95 minute black and white epic from 1935, the pictures limits itself to the events of the Christian Holy Week. While there are some good individual sequences, particularly Christ routing the money lenders from the Temple, the picture is largely bland and workmanlike. Despite impressive sets, constructed in Algeria, and costumes, Golgotha is largely an eyesore. Duvivier, overworked and not particularly invested in the material, responds by relying on the pan. He scopes the massive sets from left to right and back again. Largely, this shows off the majesty of the film's plaster columns, but fails to add to the thrust of the narrative. An exception is a pan pivoting from Christ's flagellation to the mob baying for his blood. The script is a uneasy mix of Gospel, apocrypha, and supposition with endless scenes of the Sanhedrin conspiring or Mrs. Pilate expressing misgivings to her hubby.

Acting and characterization are secondary to the attempt at spectacle. Most of the performances seem hollow and stagey, even a miscast Jean Gabin as Pilate. The other bad guys fare better: Harry Baur and Lucas Gridoux are the standouts as Herod and Judas, respectively. Robert Le Vigan is a pinched Jesus, much like H.B. Warner in DeMille's far superior King of Kings. Le Vigan, best known in the US for his roles in Renoir films such as Madame Bovary and Les Bas-fonds, became a fervent Nazi collaborator and suffered the consequences after the war. He served three years of hard labor and died after a penurious exile in Argentina in 1972. Truly, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Film buffs nutty enough to seek this time waster out, should avoid the English dubbed print on Tubi. Golgotha failed to placate the English censors, but played America to some acclaim in 1937. Duvivier, Gabin, and Gridoux would reunite for the far superior Pépé le Moko.