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The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)
1964 | Biography, Drama, History
(0 Ratings)
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"Next choice I’d say would be The Gospel According to St. Matthew, by Pasolini. I saw that movie for the first time when I was 23 years old. I’d gone to church every Sunday and catechism every week for my whole childhood, but I never paid attention; I was always daydreaming in church — and all of a sudden I went to go see this movie, and I knew everything in the movie. I guess all of my Catholic upbringing I had absorbed through some sort of osmosis. Here was this movie which was this Biblical story which was told so beautifully: the cinema was so simple and so beautiful. He had, you know, Odetta playing “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child” as the three wise men found Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus. It was, you know… I started sweating while I was watching the movie. The whole left side of my body went numb while I was watching, and I was sure that I was having a heart attack. It was all that I could do — you know, I didn’t want to because it was the greatest movie I’d ever seen — but it was all I could do to crawl out of the movie theater and knock on the projectionist’s door and ask him if I could call my girlfriend. I called my girlfriend and told her I thought I was dying, ’cause I was seeing the greatest movie I’d ever seen, and she showed up. I remember it had been snowing in Colorado and she had all this dirty snow on the roof of her car and I was eating all this dirty snow because my mouth was just parched. And I remember being in the emergency room and thinking that when the doctor walks through, if he looked like Jesus from The Gospel According to St. Matthew, I knew that meant I was dead. Fortunately the guy didn’t look anything like Jesus."

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