Messianic Ambivalence in Nicholas Ray’s “King of Kings” (1961)

In his review of Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961), the critic Ivan Spear noted that part of the film’s appeal lay with its “connotated topicalness.” “A world trembling at the prospect of nuclear self-destruction,” he wrote, “should welcome an opportunity to again review the teachings of Him who was hailed as the Messiah of Peace” (15). The evocation of the threat of nuclear armageddon in the context of a biblical epic about the life of Christ highlights both the ways in which the religious, historical, and atomic imaginations intertwined in the postwar period, and the attempts of the genre of the historico-biblical epic to work through the profound existential and eschatological anxieties produced by the possible end of human history. For an American culture that, as historian Margot A. Henriksen suggests, experienced a sense that life was ephemeral, that nothing was permanent, and a more general “difficulty in imagining a human future,” the historico-biblical epic provided an opportunity to both encounter and escape the terrifying possibilities of history and its anticipated atomic end (110).

Emerging as it did in a culture trembling at the prospect of nuclear self-destruction and the seeming imminence of that annihilation this film renders visible the terror of living in historical time embedded within the Christ narrative…