I also have to confess that I know very little of the religion of Islam, though we are inundated on a daily basis with the extremist elements that have emerged from that ideology. I can't imagine why that is, because films like "The Ten Commandments" and "King of Kings" seem to be universally known from the Christian perspective.
#THE MESSAGE 1976 REVIEWS MOVIE#
Surprisingly, I had never heard of this movie and probably would have never seen it had it not been listed in IMDb's 'Top 250' films of last year. The film has a lot of good qualities, but as they used to say in that old MacDonald's commercial: Where's the Beef. But Islam has the restriction about hearing or seeing a depiction of the Prophet which robs the film of what it needs most, a charismatic player doing the role of Mohammed and reading some of the poetical/lyrical quality of his sayings. It was the best part of the film, it couldn't have been made without it. In fact recently I saw Peter and Paul and I was quite impressed with Anthony Hopkins acting out the sermons recorded in the New Testament of Paul. In King of Kings and The Greatest Story Ever Told both Jeffrey Hunter and Max Von Sydow read lines from the New Testament as part of the dialog because the messenger is of course an integral part of the story. But in those films Jesus was not the central character. The figure of Jesus in both The Big Fisherman and Ben-Hur is seen from the rear and is not heard at all. Still even laboring under that handicap, when it opened in 1976 there were still protests. We never hear Mohammed, we see him on two occasions in long-shot and he's not recognizable. Anthony Quinn, Irene Papas, Michael Ansara and the rest of the players talk to the camera as if Mohammed was like Philip Marlowe in Lady of the Lake, that famous noir film shot in the first person. What we have in The Message is a cast playing to a vacuum.
It was by arms as well as faith that Islam triumphed in the Arabian peninsula and was spreading elsewhere when the Prophet died in 632.
He was not only a great religious teacher, but apparently quite the military strategist.
He would have to have been to have accomplished what he did. By all accounts the messenger was one charismatic fellow. The Message is about the early days of Islam, but as a film it labors under the insurmountable handicap of us not seeing the messenger. Apparently when Mohammed founded Islam he never factored in the great use that motion pictures could be made for spreading the faith.
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