Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)

Norman Jewison's 1973 adaptation of the Rice and Lloyd Webber rock opera arrives dressed as a bus tour, a troupe of hippies pitching tents in the Negev to restage the Passion in bell bottoms and tank tops. The conceit is modest and the desert is indifferent. What the production does with casting, however, remains its most durable contribution to the culture. Carl Anderson plays Judas, a Black performer handed the emotional and theological center of a story that Western cinema had spent decades reserving for white men. The surrounding ensemble is a mixed company of singers and dancers, assembled without ceremony. This was a statement in 1973, made without a line of dialogue explaining it. The film simply casts, and moves on.

The libretto's real mischief lies elsewhere. Telling the Passion from the betrayer's side, granting Judas a conscience, a grievance, and a death that reads as tragedy instead of damnation, is a substantial rewrite of the received account. He becomes a man worried about the poor. Jesus, meanwhile, snaps at lepers, tolerates expensive ointment, and overturns the tables of the money lenders with real fury. The material keeps circling a suspicion of wealth and of a movement that has lost its purpose. It is a rock opera, though, not a pamphlet. The social argument arrives on a melody and leaves on one.

Mary Magdalene gets her interiority and her signature ballad, though the film frames her almost entirely through longing for a man who will not love her back. That is the ceiling here. The colorblind casting never once examines race as a lived fact. There is no environmental conscience, no body-diverse ensemble, no neurodivergent thread to speak of. What remains is a strange, sincere artifact: a Broadway curiosity that put a Black Judas at the center of the biggest story in the West and declined to make a speech about it. The bus drives off. The cross stays in the sand.