Great Flim

It wasn't action-adventure like Ben-Hur and wasn't flashy like King of Kings. Stevens deliberately processed the film with subdued colors, from the costuming to the draining of their natural hues from mesas and rimrocks. Newman's musical score was extraordinarily muted except for the glorious resurrection music (which Stevens edited almost completely out of the picture). The dialog was not lurid, not even during Salome's dance, the beheading of the Baptist, etc. Audiences may have been expecting a more "Hollywood" production and were disappointed when they didn't get one. Granted, Stevens' lunatic insertion of cameo roles was "Hollywood" 'in extremis' but still generally the production values were not what fans of Biblical films had been conditioned to accept.