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But filmmakers, in their bid for respectability—and for stories that would have a wide appeal—continued to churn out biblical movies. Several dozen were produced during the silent era, many of them adaptations of popular nineteenth-century plays and novels such as Oscar Wilde's Salome and Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis? The Kalem Company's adaptation of Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur (1907) earned a footnote in film history as the first movie to prompt a copyright infringement lawsuit.
Filmmakers loved biblical movies because they could attract a crowd of paying customers; audiences loved biblical movies because they brought the Bible to life, and also because they sometimes made it possible for audience members to embark on virtual pilgrimages to the Holy Land. From the Manger to the Cross, the first feature-length film about the life of Jesus, was the most financially successful film in the Kalem Company's history, partly because it was filmed in Egypt and Palestine; one famous image showed Mary and Joseph resting near the Sphinx.4
Some directors used the biblical past to address the social concerns of the present. Perhaps the most spectacular proponent of this approach was D.W. Griffith. Griffith is, alas, best known for his Civil War epic, Birth of a Nation (1915), which had the unfortunate effect of reviving the Ku Klux Klan. But his ambitious follow-up, Intolerance (1916), jumped back and forth between four different stories—the fall of Babylon, the life of Jesus, the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, and a fictitious "modern" story—to show how intolerance had harmed societies throughout the ages.
Griffith's immediate agenda, in those last days before the Prohibition era, was to warn his audience against the Temperance movement. This agenda shapes Griffith's treatment of the Jesus story, which focuses on three episodes from the Gospels: the wedding at Cana, where Jesus turns water into wine (John 2); the woman caught in adultery, who is forgiven by Jesus (John 8:1-11); and the crucifixion. Griffith shows that Jesus himself was unjustly accused of being "a man gluttonous and a winebibber" (Matt. 11:19), and he makes an explicit link between the gossips of the first century and the moralists of his own day.
Griffith also addressed another form of intolerance: anti-Semitism. Protestants, fearful of the impact that movies were having on American culture, directed much of their paranoia at Jewish studio heads. Griffith hoped to rectify that by placing Jesus in a Jewish context and underscoring his Jewish identity. A rabbi directed the details of the wedding at Cana, and Griffith hired "real, old-time orthodox Jews" to play Jesus' fellow party-goers.5 The film is also clear that the gossips outside do not represent Pharisees as a whole; an onscreen footnote explains that the Pharisees were "a learned Jewish party, the name possibly brought into disrepute later by hypocrites among them."
Legendary director Cecil B. DeMille followed Griffith's lead when he produced The King of Kings (1927). De Mille pinned the blame for Jesus' death on a single individual, implicitly exonerating the Jewish people as a whole. When Pilate expresses his desire to release Jesus, the high priest tells him, "If thou, imperial Pilate, wouldst wash thy hands of this man's death, then let it be on me—and me alone!" When Jesus dies and Jerusalem is hit by a storm and an earthquake—in typically grand De Mille fashion, a crevice opens up and swallows the tree on which Judas has hanged himself—the high priest shouts into the wind, "Visit not thy wrath on thy people Israel—I alone am guilty!"
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