John Wayne, Angela Lansbury, And More Stars Cameo In This Epic Streaming For Free

Whenever a Hollywood epic gets so drunk on its own cultural importance that it attempts to pre-legitimize itself by casting every available star in town, you can be quite certain that the finished product will be either a terminal bore or a full-blown disaster. Darryl F. Zanuck's "The Longest Day" is very much the former, a 178-minute grind that tries and largely fails to thrust moviegoers into the middle of the D-Day invasion via docudrama techniques; it's often technically impressive, but it quickly turns into a game of spot-the-star, which pulls us straight out of the movie. And then there's 1967's "Casino Royale," a celebrity-studded James Bond parody that feels like watching an exclusive, booze-fueled bash from the house across the street.

There are obvious exceptions, but they come with the caveat of knowingly satirizing Hollywood's insularity (Robert Altman's "The Player") or simply being a hot project that every actor in town was desperate to be a part of no matter how small the role (Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line"). This brings us to 1965's "The Greatest Story Ever Told," which, in theory, should've been somewhere in the league of Malick's movie. The long-in-gestation biblical epic about the life of Jesus Christ came along at a time when three-hour religious sagas were falling out of commercial favor. It also had the bad luck of going into production a year after the release of Nicholas Ray's "King of Kings," which told the same "Greatest Story."

"The Greatest Story Ever Told" had two things going for it in that a) the Ray film, while a box office hit, hadn't left much of a cultural footprint, and b) two-time Academy Award-winning director George Stevens ("A Place in the Sun" and "Giant") had acquired the rights to produce and helm the epic. With Stevens on board, there was a sense that this would be the definitive Hollywood recounting of the gospel. As a result, stars were courted for roles big and miniscule as a means of conveying to the moviegoing public that this would be, quite possibly, the epic to end all epics. How did this work out?

To its credit, "The Greatest Story Ever Told," which you can now watch for free on a few streaming platforms, did not go superstar-heavy for the two main roles. Max von Sydow, the toast of world cinema via his performances in Ingmar Bergman's Swedish dramas, won the role of Jesus Christ, while Dorothy McGuire, a Best Actress Oscar nominee for her work in Elia Kazan's "Gentlemen's Agreement," was selected to play the Virgin Mary. Casting Charlton "Ben-Hur" Heston as John the Baptist certainly stirred a good deal of interest, but Claude Rains, José Ferrer, and Martin Landau weren't break-down-the-gates celebrities.

It's when you get further down the casting line that "The Greatest Story Ever Told" gets silly. Sidney Poitier, Angela Lansbury, Shelley Winters, Robert Blake, and pop star Pat Boone in glorified walk-on roles were strictly for publicity. And then there was the clincher: John Wayne as a Roman centurion.

During my childhood, Stevens' film was one of several spiritually nutritional movies that got forced on children once a year. I'm not going to pretend that I was happy to sit through four commercially interrupted hours of "The Ten Commandments" or "Ben-Hur", but at least they had bravura set pieces. "The Greatest Story Ever Told" just had stars — lots and lots of stars, right down to Duke Wayne sleepily intoning the film's final line, "Truly, this man was the son of God." The film grossed $15.5 million against a $20 million budget and didn't break even until United Artists sold the television rights to NBC for $5 million. At 199 minutes, it's a whole lot of movie. If nothing else, you can say that the money is on the screen, because nobody worked for cheap on this film.