From the Work of the Masters

The script is mainly by St. Luke, the pictures by the greatest hands of the High Renaissance, and the result is one television show that will probably be run and rerun--in churches, schools, art courses, and over the air. Scheduled for this week (Wednesday, Dec. 21), The Coming of Christ is the latest in NBC's superb Project Twenty series, uses the same technique of still photographs and quiet narration that made television masterpieces of 1959's Meet Mr. Lincoln and last April's Mark Twain's America.

This one, however, is in color; brilliant reproductions--from Rubens to Rembrandt--fill the screen, with occasionally interspersed photographs of the pastel landscape of the Holy Land as it is now. Accompanied by a superb Robert Russell Bennett score, detail follows detail from the works of the masters--the pale, thin-lipped face of the Virgin in Rogier van der Weyden's Annunciation, fearful tears in the aged eyes of a Jordaens shepherd, Massys' open-mouthed Magi. Skillfully but not trickily panning across the pictures from face to face, scene to scene, Producer-Director Donald Hyatt achieves a unique sense of motion and drama. Gradually, the life of Christ (to the Sermon on the Mount) is told more effectively than it ever could be from a pulpit.

The program's distinction stems from a long and collective experience, rare in television, that began nine years ago with the 26-part series Victory at Sea (to be revived next week in a go-minute condensation), followed by such milestones as The Jazz Age and The Innocent Years (1900-14). For early next year, Hyatt & Co. have prepared a program on American music in the '305 and an examination of The Real West (Gary Cooper narrating) that should leave the average TV oater looking like whinny the pooh. And this Easter or next Project Twenty will complete its life of Christ, taking the story step by step through Tintoretto's Crucifixion and Mantegna's Ascension.

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