PARTING SHOT

When racial bigots running the South African government want to ban a film, they have their ways. They send armed “security police” to the theaters to seize the films. That’s what they did recently with Cry Freedom, starring Kevin Kline and Denzel Washington.

In South Africa, they cite something called the 1982 Internal Security Act. One of the people portrayed in the movie, journalist Donald Woods, is officially banned. Banned people cannot be quoted, even by actors, according to the Internal Security Act. The film also offends the white-run government because it depicts the secret police as violent thugs. That would seem to be a pretty fair depiction, since the secret police did beat to death another person portrayed in the movie, black activist Steven Biko.

When religious bigots in America want to ban a film, they also have their ways. They cannot send armed security police to snatch the movies. But they can use the threat of boycotts, raise the specter of anti-Semitism, and promise political reprisals. That’s what they’re doing with The Last Temptation of Christ, the movie based on the 1960 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, better known for Zorba the Greek. The new movie stars Willem Dafoe as Christ and Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene.

In America, the religious bigots cite their interpretation of Jesus, which they insist is divinely inspired, “scriptural,” and therefore the only legitimate view of the Christ. Nobody else has a right to view their Jesus in any other way. Above all, nobody has any right to make a movie that shows Jesus in a way they do not approve. And they really do not approve of Last Temptation. Southern Baptist Convention president Jerry Vines says that the film’s Jesus is a “voyeuristic, whoremongering wimp”-a rare combination of qualities, but the Rev. Vines gives no points for originality.

Oddly enough, the religious movie-banners would seem to be on shakier ground than the racist movie-banners. At least the South Africans have some fragile shelter in the rule of law. albeit an irrational and unjust law, The Official Interpreters of Jesus, on the other hand, know that their tactics would never stand up in a court of law.

That’s why the religious zealots, led by the Southern Baptists, the Campus Crusade for Christ, and the American Family Association, are trying to get this thing handled without messing with the courts, which are pretty well packed now with Reagan appointees who still have to use the same Constitution used by those Supreme Court liberals. But there’s more than one way to squelch a film. Shortly after the storm broke, the United Artists theater chain said they would not show the blasphemous offal in these God-fearing South Central states. General Cinema and AMC said they needed more time to think it over, AMC’s head film buyer in the South. Gene Goodman, may not have bent over far enough to suit the Christian censors: he announced that his company would take the extraordinary step of actually seeing (he film before deciding what to do. It’s conceivable, though unlikely, that Those Who Know Best will see to it that Last Temptation never fouls our local theaters. That will leave more room for classics like Big Top Pee Wee, Caddyshack //, and those bloodorama drive-in flicks that don’t seem to bother our censors.

“I have never seen anything like this” in thirty years in the film business, says AMC’s Goodman, whose Dallas office has received angry phone calls, letters, and petitions bearing hundreds of signatures. One holy man, the sort who can do a faith reading over the telephone, called from Oklahoma to tell Goodman, “If you were a Christian, you wouldn’t play this film.”



BUT THIS IS MILD STUFF COMPARED TO other tactics of the God Squad. The chief executive officer and the president of MCA Inc., which will release the movie through Universal Pictures in September, happen to be Jewish. And this gives the true believers another weapon. They’re worried, don’t you know, that Last Temptation could awaken dormant anti-Semitism. This ugly veiled threat (don’t meddle in this, Jew) is monumentally hypocritical, since any anti-Jewish sentiment stirred by the film would be stirred by the would-be banners themselves. Who else would be concerned about the religion or ethnicity of Universal executives?

And the censors are prepared to go further. Texas’s own Bob Strauss, the mayor’s brother-in-law, sits on the board of MCA and is a key Democratic party insider. MCA’s top man. Lew Wasserman, is a major contributor to the party-and the zealots strongly hint that they’ll tie Last Temptation to those godless liberal Democrats come the election. Even Olympia Dukakis may not be enough to withstand that broadside.

If the zealots were playing this thing rationally, they might just sit back and wail for Last Temptation to bomb, as it almost certainly will if the screenplay stays true to Kazantzakis’s novel. It’s just the son of complex, layered, serious book that is almost allergic to celluloid. The writing is florid and bombastic in parts, but on the whole it’s thought-provoking, moving stuff-all of which means nothing in the hands of studio moguls and screenwriters. If they can reduce Heywood Gould’s startling, original Cocktail to a bland brochure for Tom Cruise’s teeth, they can botch anything.

But of course this controversy was never about the quality of a film. Most of the leading pulpiteers spurned Universal’s offer to screen the movie. The issue with them is not lighting or cinematography; they just do not want Jesus shown as the novel and the movie show him, as a living, breathing man taking part in the world and its glories, one of which is s-e-x.

No, this trouble is not about the quality of a movie. It’s about the fragility of a democracy. Nobody denies that those who are offended by this movie have a right to peacefully protest, write letters, flood the radio talk shows. They have the right to offer, as they did, a million dollars for the film so they can destroy it-and MCA has a right to refuse the money. They certainly have the right to refuse a penny of their entertainment dollar for any film that runs counter to anything they believe. They even have the right, if they insist, to roil the waters with anti-Semitic muck.

And then what? The Birmingham News has already refused to run advertisements for the movie; the Orlando Sentinel and other Southern papers will likely follow suit. National figures like Jerry Falwell can mobilize thousands of followers to boycott the major chains that dare to show the film. Suppose that Universal, which after all is not a charity, decides there’s no point in releasing a movie that’s already DOA at the box office?

I guess we could still read the book. Ormaybe we should check with the Rev. Vinesand the Rev. Falwell about that.