Piety with Profit

Decades ago Cecil B. DeMille went to Oberammergau, saw the Passion Play, and left with a vision of all the great celluloid saint-and-sinner-ramas that he hoped to produce. Last week, to attend the century's seventh production of the 300-year-old Bavarian pageant, pilgrims 'crowded into Bavaria in Peugeots, Rolls-Royces, light aircraft, bikes and buses. As the play went on and on and on, lids closed over once reverent eyes: what everyone had come to see--from seats of softest oak--was nothing less than DeMille squared, a seven-hour pseudo-Biblical presentation with a cast of 1,600 painful amateurs. As a Variety headline cried out:

OBERAMMERGAU, MEIN ACHING BACK.

The Heavies. Performed on a 160-ft. stage under an enormous shed, the Passion Play strikes many in its audience as deeply moving, but to even more it seems a cumbersome who-done-it that turns eventually into a hope opera. Will the Sanhedrin succeed in its plot against the Nazarene? The outcome actually seems uncertain most of the time. Despite occasional effective scenes--such as Christ's Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem--the scenario is often less lively than the begat-begat-begat chapters of Genesis. "Living tableaux" of scenes from the Old Testament contribute little but an impression of so many Bavarian countryfolk assembling for a photograph in Biblical costume.

Respectful but firm, West Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung has called for a "thorough revision" in place of the minor script-surgery performed over the last decade, mainly to excise some anti-Semitic passages. In the Hitler era (when almost all the leading members of the cast were Nazis except Judas), the Sanhedrin was packed with overdrawn heavies, atrociously attacking the blond Christ and his blue-eyed disciples. Somehow this spirit, if toned down, remained in 1950.

After Intermission. But anti-Semitism was only the beginning of the Passion Play's troubles. As drama "it is a mixture of Lourdes and summer stock," said a perspicacious lady from Philadelphia last week, and at least ten years of rewriting seem required. Oberammergau has just enough time for that, is meanwhile tithing a catch of visitors whose total will have reached half a million when the show closes on the last day of September.

Expecting to take in some $5,000,000, Oberammergau's humble townsfolk are selling everything from machine-carved angels to toilet privileges. Life-sized wooden saints go for $1,000. Beggars, who used to count on the Crucifixion scene to cause spectators to empty their pockets in compassion, have long since been driven away by green-coated police, as if to ensure that every pfennig spent in Oberammergau stays in town. Charges have been established with great ingenuity for nearly every action a visitor makes while he is there, with one exception: no way has been devised to shake down the inevitable intruders who fill the seats that remain empty after the two-hour intermission.

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