JESUS OF NAZARETH, TV miniseries is very long

The 3 year public life and preaching of Jesus as presented in this miniseries.  Jesus is a white guy with deep piercing blue eyes. The large cast is made up of a bunch of Hollywood and English movie stars.  The miniseries is very long. All of the above points were major criticisms of George Steven's The Greatest Story Ever Told.  However this film got good reviews, go figure.

Robert Powell plays Jesus with a lot of soft spoken sincerity but at times kind of comes off as a creepy cult leader.  He speaks in the usual biblical platitudes probably more a fault of everyone having to hear the same New Testament stories over and over in Sunday school

The director Franco Zeffirelli moves along from one biblical event to the next. We get the feeding of the crowd with the loafs and fishes, casting out the money changers from the temple, the last supper etc.

Jesus of Nazareth is not without of it's good points but it's a long slow crawl to get to the resurrection. Frankly this miniseries is pretty boring.

Besides Zeffirelli the writers included Anthony Burgess and Suso Cecchi d'Amico,  The film comes in at a whopping 374 minutes.

1972 - BROTHER SON, SISTER MOON, the hippie Saint Francis

Returning from some war,  Francesco has a spiritual crisis and decides to rebuild a monastery and minister to the poor.  This is the story of St. Francis of Assisi portrayed as if he was some sort of conscious objector during the Vietnam War.

Directed by Franco Zeffirelli who had been an assistant to Visconti, Rossellini and De Sica, he should have known better.  The film lacks the virtues of a saint who took vows of poverty and simplicity amongst other things.  An overblown bunch of overproduced slop with lots of scenes of people frolicking in fields of flowers and artistic shots of lepers arranged in front of a water fall for pictorial effect.  The cast is made of up young pretty actors who look like they came out of a fashion show rather than a religious order.

There is a very deliberate attempt to portray Francis and his followers as a bunch of hippie freaks, instead they come off as clueless idiots with some sort of strange mental problems.  Frequently awful songs by folk singer Donovan are heard on the soundtrack set to the words of St. Francis.  The whole thing seemed to be pitched at an audience of potheads.

Towards the end of the film Alec Guinness shows up in an extended cameo as  Pope Obi Wan Kenobi or something to validate the philosophy of St Francis.  May the "Force" be with St Francis.

122 minutes, written by Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Lina Wertmüller, Kenneth Ross and Franco Zeffirelli.