General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The King of Kings (1927 film)

The King of Kings is a 1927 American silent biblical epic directed and produced by Cecil B. DeMille that dramatizes the final period of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, from the redemption of Mary Magdalene through the Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension.¹^•² Produced by DeMille Pictures Corporation and distributed by the Producers Distributing Corporation, it premiered in New York on April 19, 1927 and became one of the most widely seen religious films of the silent era, playing for decades in churches, missions, and schools around the world.¹^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director / producer	Cecil B. DeMille; story and continuity by Jeanie Macpherson¹
Premiere	New York opening April 19, 1927; first movie shown at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, on May 18, 1927¹^•⁴
Running times	155-minute roadshow version; 112-minute general release version⁵
Cost and gross	Cost $1,265,283.95 and grossed $2,641,687.21, excluding later reissues, television syndication, and home entertainment¹
Principal cast	H.B. Warner (Jesus), Dorothy Cumming (Mary), Ernest Torrence (Peter), Joseph Schildkraut (Judas), Jacqueline Logan (Mary Magdalene), Victor Varconi (Pontius Pilate)⁵
Color	Black and white with Technicolor color sequences, opening in two-strip Technicolor⁶^•³
Reissue	Reissued in 1931 with a synchronized musical score by Hugo Riesenfeld⁶^•⁵

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film opens in the palace of Mary Magdalene (Jacqueline Logan), whose lover Judas (Joseph Schildkraut) has abandoned her to follow a carpenter from Galilee; DeMille invented this love affair between Judas and Mary Magdalene as an artistic license with the material.³^•² The opening section covers chosen episodes from Jesus's time as a teacher, among them expelling the seven deadly sins from Mary Magdalene, bringing Lazarus back to life, expelling the moneychangers from the temple, and teaching the Lord's Prayer. The second half deals with the Passion: the Last Supper, the betrayal by Judas, the trial before Pilate, the bearing of the Cross to Calvary, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension.⁶ The intertitles quote scripture directly from the four Gospels.⁸

An early plan to boost popular appeal divided the film into two parts, the first the Christ story and the second a sin-filled modern story illustrating human ignorance of Christ's message; the released film does not follow this structure.²

Production

DeMille had already proven his suitability to the biblical epic with the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, which made an enormous profit despite production costs of $2,265,283, and he wanted The King of Kings to achieve similar success.² Filming ran from August 24, 1926 to January 10, 1927, with portions shot on location on Santa Catalina Island, where a Galilee set was built.⁶^•¹ The cinematographer was J. Peverell Marley, the editor Anne Bauchens, and the art directors included Mitchell Leisen, Dan Sayre Groesbeck, and Anton Grot.¹

Religious supervision. In an attempt to honor the material, DeMille kept a Jesuit priest and several other clergy, including a rabbi, on hand during filming to ensure proper reverence for the subject.² The representative from the National Catholic Welfare Council, Father Daniel Lord, S.J., said Mass on the Galilee set on Catalina Island, and DeMille took a particular liking to him.¹^•² The first day of shooting was honored with prayers offered by representatives of the Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim faiths; each morning DeMille entered the set to the strains of "Onward, Christian Soldiers!", and cast members were given Bibles and asked to call each other by their biblical names on the sound stage.²

The actor playing Christ. H.B. Warner was required to endure a degree of religious deprivation: he was told not to speak to anyone on the set except the director and not to be seen in public during production. This attention to appearances followed an early incident in which a newspaper photographer photographed Warner in full Christ garb lounging in a chair, smoking a cigarette and reading the sports pages.² In performance, Warner generally avoided emotional expressiveness; the film evokes Christ's charisma through special effects, lighting, and editing rather than through acting, with the figure most often moving through darkened space radiating a divine glow by means of an ill-defined halo.⁷

Versions and release

The 155-minute roadshow version premiered at the grand opening of Grauman's Chinese Theatre on May 18, 1927, the first movie shown at that theater; Hollywood Boulevard was mobbed, with a reported 100,000 people outside, and D.W. Griffith opened the ceremonies by declaring DeMille the greatest producer of all time.⁴^•⁷ DeMille subsequently cut the film to a 112-minute general release version, and for decades home video carried only this shorter 1928 cut.⁵^•⁹ The longer version includes nearly three-quarters of an hour of additional footage, among them a scene in which Jesus casts out an evil spirit that Judas had tried but failed to exorcise, and a sequence combining the question of paying taxes to Caesar with the temple-tax episode in which Jesus sends Peter to catch a fish carrying a denarius in its mouth.⁹

The film was reissued in 1931 with a synchronized musical score by Hugo Riesenfeld.⁶ The Criterion Collection's restored two-disc edition presents both the 155-minute roadshow version and the 112-minute general release, with new scores by Donald Sosin and Timothy J. Tikker alongside Riesenfeld's original.⁵

Reception and controversy

Contemporary reviews were strongly favorable. Variety's founder Sime Silverman began his review, "Tremendous is The King of Kings—tremendous in its lesson, in the daring of its picturization for a commercial theater and tremendous in its biggest scene, The Crucifixion of Christ," and an early review in The Film Daily called it the best telling of the Christ story the screen had revealed.⁷^•¹⁰ During its first nineteen weeks at the Gaiety Theatre on Broadway the film grossed $236,503, regarded as unusual given a weekly capacity of $14,400.¹ The 1929 Film Daily Year Book voted it one of the "Top Best Features" of 1928.⁶

Controversy. As with later films about Christ, The King of Kings met with controversy in its day. Jewish groups criticized the film because they said it condemned them as Christ's crucifiers; in November 1927 the Board of Rabbis of Northern California issued a statement characterizing the film as tending to "fix in the public mind ancient and unfounded religious prejudices."²^•¹¹ Others said DeMille simply pandered to his audience's emotions, and some called him a Christian propagandist; John Steinbeck was said to have remarked after viewing it, "saw the picture, loved the book."²

Legacy

The film's sets and crowd scenes rivaled D.W. Griffith's Intolerance in scale and ornateness, and its staging of an earthquake at the Crucifixion remained a feat of special effects.⁷^•³ Its images shaped the popular iconography of Jesus for generations, and the film is credited with making Jesus Christ a movie star; Hollywood did not make another portrait of Jesus and Pilate for three decades, until Nicholas Ray's King of Kings (1961), which was not a remake but the first Hollywood attempt to tell Jesus' entire life story from birth to death.³^•⁷^•¹² Through a policy of loaning the film to civic and religious groups for a small fee, it circulated so widely that some sources claim it has been watched by enormous audiences worldwide, and Rev. Daniel Lord wrote that it had never known a day since 1927 when it was not shown in some corner of the earth.²^•¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026