Jules Dassin set himself a huge task when he decided to film He Who Must Die-- the task of showing how and why Christ, if He came to earth, must again be crucified. Fortunately, Dassin was given a good head start by the book of the same title written by Nikos Kazantzaki, an unquestionably talented author. His presumption, however, as well as that of Dassin, can and ought to be questioned, though not without honest attempts at an answer.

The first reaction to the idea is fear that Dassin may have tried something that could only resemble one of DeMille's tremendous Biblical farces. Many will stay away on this account. Others, attending the film despite this doubt, will come out hard pressed not to praise it effusively.

The story takes place in 1921, in a rural Greek village under Turkish domination, a town which has chosen from its populace a cast for the septennial Passion play: a Jesus, and a Peter, James, John, Judas and Mary Magdelan. The play itself never gets produced, but the characters, from the moments they are chosen, find themselves beginning to play their roles in real life.

A group of exiles appear from a neighboring village which has been sacked by the Turks for aiding Greek resistance, and the town must now decide whether to shelter them at the risk of incurring Turkish wrath. Content with prosperous servitude, the village's Orthodox pope and his council turn them away, telling the town that the strangers have cholera. The pope justifies this lie as a figure of speech--the exiles bear the "cholera" of rebellion and anarchy.

Save for Judas, those named for the Passion play sympathize with these outcasts. Manolios, the shepherd playing Jesus, finally leads the town to revolt against its leaders. Their revolt soon deflates, however, and they join their pope in a battle against the exiles which forces the Turkish Agha to deliver Manolios to death at the hands of his townspeople. Shocked by the crime, townsmen begin to join the exiles against the Turks.

At first glance this "fighting ending" seems an adequate answer to the question of why Manolios (or Christ) had to die. Actually, the story after Manolios' death takes the form of an epilogue. Seen in this perspective, the "fighting ending" only suggests that fighting common enemies transcends fighting friends, which, rather than sanctioning battle, indicates a fine irony that Manolios' death brings not only unity, but more death.

No single or even direct combination of answers in the film justifies Dassin's big question. The justification comes from an evocation of smaller questions, like that about fighting, and their probable answers. On this level, the story succeeds completely. The virtue in asking a "big question" lies in the fact that many smaller questions, subsumed, become answered.

At one point in the movie, a hero is defined as someone who comes to fill the needs of others. Filling the small needs of many, Manolios approaches the stature of Christ. To put someone on the screen, posing him as Christ to the point of naming him, is blatantly presumptuous. But the fact that Dassin does it successfully absolves him of presumption.

The shepherd makes a convincing Christ, thanks largely to a brilliant device of Kazantzaki: until he most needs speech the shepherd stutters incomprehensibly, at which time his simple courage and sincerity is given tongue. The rest of the credit belongs to the director, who uses the camera throughout the first half of the film in a straight-on manner, getting dramatic effects from posing and from motion directly in and out or across the screen. His scenes resemble a series of carefully posed Renaissance paintings, narrating a Biblical story, for he focuses attention not by close-ups or dramatic angles, but by composition, especially in direction of faces from the crowd, suggesting, in those scenes which involve Manolios, that these people somehow need him and want to force him to the center. Later in the movie, he does become their natural focal point, after sudden use of dramatic camera angles conveys the excitement of his transformation.

Ultimately, the story revolves around Manolios' effect on other people. With such a subject, the best description is indirect. Beside the dramatic use of crowds, Dassin traces individual characters. Although the entire cast performs laudably, the roles of Mary Magdelan and that of the Turkish Agha deserve special note, both for themselves and for the skill with which they are filled. The former experiences fully and convincingly the joys of virtue and of vice; the latter commits himself to detachment. Were his portrait drawn with less sympathy, a criticism of the Turk's detachment might be the biggest single answer in the movie.

Most scenes with the Agha are shot in the neutral gray of shadowy interiors. Only once--on horseback--does he come fully into the sunlight, where he briefly loses stature. In contrast, the world of Manolios and his "apostles" appears as the quietly violent whiteness of the Greek countryside, a brightness broken by the cold black of one night scene--during which Manolios goes through the agony of mockery, rejection, and self-doubt.

The movie was made in a Greek village called Kritza with its populace participating. Dassin's evocation of this atmosphere is the final triumph of the film. He has isolated a place which seems to belong at once to antiquity and to the modern world, and found it inhabited with people of all shades of passion and knowledge, from the clearest white to the darkest black. A tremendously serious movie, it is also full of wise and ridiculous humor. Surely there is no better sign than this of Dassin's success.