Jesus, Christians & American movies
• Hodgepodge
An entertaining look at American Jesus movies through the decades:
By 1934, the Catholic Church institutionalized the theocratic scrutiny of movies with the creation of the Legion of Decency, which kept a hawk eye on Hollywood's presentation of things biblical. Feeling besieged from all sides, filmmakers shied away from Jesus' life and times for the better part of the following two decades.
Jesus in Movies Through the Years
And:77 years ago, opposition strong to Christ filmThirty years later, Cecil B. DeMille was still angry.
"It was easy enough to ignore the vociferousness of some tiny but militant atheist societies," he wrote in his 1959 autobiography. "What was harder to comprehend and cope with was the organized opposition of certain Jewish groups to this filmed history of the greatest Jew who ever lived.