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Protests from the religious community against
Martin Scorsese’s
The Last Temptation of Christ began while the film was still in production. To a degree,
Scorsese, the film’s screenwriter
Paul Schrader, and
Universal had anticipated some unrest, but even they were caught out by the intensity of feeling against the film. It is, perhaps, surprising that
Scorsese, who was raised a Catholic (but who had lapsed when the film was made) underestimated the level of reaction to a movie that was described by one executive as ‘It’s a Wonderful Life with Jesus as George Bailey.’
Although there was nothing frivolous about the strength of feeling aroused by the content of the film, the level of near hysterical protests and accusationsat times reached almost comical proportions. For some time false rumours had circulated that there were plans to make a film which would portray
Jesusas a homosexual, and it was perhaps inevitable that some Christians would confuse
Scorsese’s film with that completely fabricated project. When the studio neglected to screen the film for Evangelist activists picketing was threatened; then, when the studio arranged a belated screening, the activists refused to attend. At the furthest extremes the faithful were called upon to pray for
God to drop a bomb on a cinema in Manhattan where the film was being shown. Some cinemas showing the film were ransacked; one cinema suffered an arson attack, while another had its screen slashed. A third had a bus driven into its lobby. In the Southern United States most cinemas chose not to screen the film because of fears of violent reprisals.
Blasphemy was not the only accusation aimed at the film. Incredibly – given that the film was directed by a Roman Catholic, written by a Dutch Calvinist, and based on a novel by a Greek Orthodox writer – the film was accused of being Jewish anti-Christian propaganda.
Producer
Lew Wasserman – the only Jew involved with the project – bore the brunt of these anti-Semitic protestors. Christian groups demonstrated outside his home, while another protest featured a man representing a Jewish producer whipping another pretending to be
Jesus through the streets of Beverly Hills. Outside
Universal Studios, demonstrators enacted a scene in which
Lew Wasserman nailed
Jesus to the cross. In
Harper’s Magazine, correspondence between
Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the
Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and
Pat Robertson, the Chairman of the
Christian Broadcasting Network, was published. When
Foxman called on
Robertson to condemn allegations that the film was an affront by Jews to Christianity,
Robertson refused and called on the
Anti-Defamation League to condemn the film in order to demonstrate that ‘The Last Temptation of Christ does not have the endorsement of the Jewish leadership in America'.
Foxman denied that the ‘Jewish leadership’ was the film industry, and asked ‘Why should Jews be put on the defensive because age-old stereotypes unfortunately still exist? We will not be blamed for the crucifixion a second time.’
Pat Robertson condemned the film as ‘an offence to a hundred million Christians. It ridicules and blasphemes the faith that we have all committed our lives to'. Christian fundamentalists like
Robertson organised a major protest outside
Universal Studios. Ironically, they parked their cars in the studio car park, generating $4,500 in parking charges for the studio. Another protestor,
Bill Bright of the
Campus Crusade for Christ, offered the studio $10 million to allow him to destroy the film. In 1989, Albuquerque high school teacher
Joyce Briscoe found herself at the centre of controversy when she screened the film for students at La Cueva High School, thus provoking the wrath of the student’s parents and local Christian radio station KLYT.
The protests against the film were not only confined to the United States. In Italy,
Franco Zeffirelli, director of the 1977 film
Jesus of Nazareth, was particularly vitriolic about
Scorsese’s film, describing it at the
Venice Film Festival as ‘truly horrible and totally deranged’ without actually having seen the film. He later decried the film as a product of ‘that Jewish cultural scum of Los Angeles, which is always spoiling for an attack on the Christian world.’
On 22nd October 1988, a French Christian fundamentalist group firebombed the
Saint Michel cinema in Paris severely burning four people and injuring a further nine. A similar attack was staged In Besancon, the capital of the Franche-Comtéregion, and tear gas was released in other French cinemas. In Greece, the homeland of the novelist
Nikos Kazantzakis, on whose book the film was based,
Archbishop Iakovos, the primate of the Greek Othodox Church, called for a boycott of the film (
Kazantzakis was excommunicated as a heretic by the Greek Orthodox Church, and the book placed in the Catholic Church’s index of forbidden books when it was first published).
The film was banned in many countries, including Argentina, Chile, Ireland, Israel, Mexico and Turkey, and bans remain in place in the Philippines, Singapore and South Africa. Even in more liberal countries such as Britain, the film has been the centre of much controversy; as late as 1992 the House of Lords was questioning the wisdom of the
BBC’s decision to screen the film on national television...
The Last Temptation of Christ - The Protests Movie Movie - The History of World Cinema
