Celui qui doit mourir (1957) - film review

In the 1920s, with Greece is under Turkish occupation, the inhabitants of a small town are making preparations for the annual Passion play.  Manolios, a shepherd with a crippling stammer is cast as Jesus, whilst a prostitute is given the role of Mary Magdalene.  The town is visited by a convoy of refugees from a neighbouring village which was sacked by the Turks.  Fearing that any show of kindness towards these refugees will upset the delicate peace with the Turks, the town’s patriarch has them driven away.  The idealistic Manolios manages to convince some of the townspeople to have pity on the refugees, and one man, Michelis, allows them to stay on land inherited from his father.  Furious, the patriarch persuades his Turkish masters to deal with Manolios and his misguided followers…

Celui qui doit mourir was the second film that director Jules Dassin made in France – after the influential noir masterpiece Du rififi chez les homes (1955).  At the time, Dassin was effectively forced into exile in Europe to escape anti-Communist persecution that was rampant across the United States in the 1950s.  Despite being one of his lesser known films, Celui qui doit mourir stands as one of Dassin’s most ambitious and humanist works – a powerful, intensely ironic retelling of the Gospel in 1920s Greece, based on novel “Christ Recrucified” by Nikos Kazantzakis.

The film features some notable actors of the period, including Jean Servais, Maurice Ronet and Gert Fröbe, as well as Dassin’s wife-to-be, Melina Mercouri.  However, it is Pierre Vaneck who is most memorable, as the sympathetic hero destined for the (metaphorical) crucifix.  Dassin combines his own natural film noir style with some shades of neo-realism, making this a pretty hard-edged, unsentimental morality drama (with a few suggestions of black comedy along the way).   The moral of the film is that human beings never learn and are destined to repeat the errors of the past, but there is also more than a hint of anti-Church mockery.  The film’s central irony – which Dassin draws out so well – is that it is those who are most familiar with the teachings of Christ who end up rejecting and then executing a second Christ.


© James Travers 2005

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