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Stories from the Bible have frequently been used in films. There are sound reasons for motion picture producers to turn to the Bible as source material. The stories, in the public domain, are already familiar to potential audiences. They contain sweeping, but relatively straightforward, narratives of good versus evil, and feature crowd-pleasing battles, sword fights, natural disasters, and miracles. ==History== Hollywood has been producing movies based on Bible stories since 1897. One of the earliest biblical films was the 1903 production of "Samson and Delilah", produced by the French company Pathè. Another early film about a story in Genesis was the 1904 French film "Joseph Vendu Par Ses Frères" (Joseph Sold by his Brothers). Enrico Guazzoni's 1912 Italian epic "Quo Vadis?" is often considered the first successful feature-length motion picture and one of the first films with over two hours running time.〔("Epics-Historical Films", AMC )〕 Cecil B. DeMille specialized in extravagant epics throughout a career that spanned both the silent and sound eras. His 1923 silent version of ''The Ten Commandments'' (1923) included spectacular special effects for the parting of the Red Sea. De Mille followed "The Ten Commandments" in 1927 with King of Kings, a lavish, reverential life of Christ with a climactic resurrection scene in color. King of Kings was re-released in 1931 with a synchronized musical score.〔 MGM's 1926 silent-era ''Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ'', starring Ramon Novarro was the most expensive film of its time. It included two spectacular scenes: the sea galley battle with pirates and the famous chariot-race.〔 Another "swords and sandals" epic of the 1920s was "Noah's Ark" which combined title cards with spoken dialogue. The major studios produced fewer epics during the 1940s due in part to wartime scarcity of resources. After the war, some of Hollywood's highest grossing films were religious epics produced as vehicles for its biggest stars.〔(Orden, Erika. "Hollywood's New Bible Stories", ''Wall Street Journal'', September 27, 2012 )〕 "Samson and Delilah" was the biggest moneymaking movie of 1949 and is considered the picture that sparked the biblical-epic film craze of the 1950s.〔(Hicks, Chris. "Samson and Delilah" was start of biblical-epic film craze", ''Deseret News'', March 7, 2013 )〕 It was followed by two of 1951’s biggest box-office hits, “Quo Vadis” and “David and Bathsheba”. Charlton Heston starred in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" and "Ben-Hur". According to author Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, in the 1950s and 1960s, during the era of the production code, "the most acceptable cinematic path for movies to incorporate sex and violence was the biblical epic".〔(Apostolos-Cappadona, Diane. "Review of Hallbäck and Hvithamar's 'The Bible in Contemporary Cinema', ''Review of Biblical Literature'', Society of Biblical Literature, October 25, 2009 )〕 Basing a film on the Bible allowed it to be more risqué than would normally have been accepted. Figures like Eve, Delilah, Jezebel and Judith could all be portrayed as seductive temptresses. In tales such as Sodom and Gomorrah and Samson and Delilah, exotic sins could be lavishly portrayed on screen. In his autobiography, DeMille wrote, "I am sometimes accused of gingering up the Bible with large and lavish infusions of sex and violence. I can only wonder if my accusers have ever read certain parts of the Bible."〔("Samson and Delilah: a good effort at biblical sex and violence", ''The Guardian'', June 20, 2013 )〕 By the 1950s movies had to compete with television and became more colorful and bigger in story and scope. In 1953, CinemaScope was introduced in “The Robe". In 1956 DeMille remade his 1923 film ''The Ten Commandments''. It was the biggest moneymaker of 1956, nominated for seven Academy Awards, and won for special effects.〔 Professor Drew Casper, a film historian at the University of Southern California, says that by the mid-1960s several epic-style biblical movies flopped, and were partially blamed for the movie industry's financial troubles at that time. Two major studio attempts to make a film of Jesus' life during this period, "The Greatest Story Ever Told" and "King of Kings" were both commercial failures. "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (1965) cost $20 million, and recouped only $1.2 million.〔 With the end of the studio system and the changing social climate, the Bible epic film fell out of favour. Mel Gibson's controversial ''The Passion of the Christ'' (2004), an interpretation of the last 12 hours in the life of Jesus, was extremely profitable, grossing $370 million (domestic). Due to dialogue in Hebrew and Aramaic, it was subtitled. It set a record for the highest-grossing independent film of all time.〔(Dirks, Tim. "The History of Film", AMC )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Bible in film」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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