The New York office had been trying to tone down their Hollywood partner's flair for Griffithian spectacle, to stick with contemporary settings — which, in the Roaring 20s seemed spectacular enough. But in the years after Intolerance, Cecil B. De Mille's films kept flashing back from the Jazz Age to ancient Babylon, Rome, Egypt, the Exodus, even caveman days. Rationalized as a "warning" of where unchecked decadence would lead, DeMille's method was really an excuse to indulge in it. After all, this is the director who invented the obligatory bathtub or bedroom scene to get his actresses out of their clothes. This winning combination of stern moralizing and spectacular excess led to DeMille's 1927 King of Kings, in which he finally abandoned the Modern world for good, and promised to treat his subject with all due respect — a promise he made good on enough to make this the most-seen Gospel film for a entire generation at least.

In typical DeMille style, the film opens with the beautiful courtesan Mary of Magdala, feasting with friends in her opulent palace, enjoying lavish entertainments. She drives off in her zebra-drawn carriage in search of her friend Judas, who has become entranced by a certain carpenter of Nazareth. Our first glimpse of Jesus doesn't come until after several scenes into the film, and it's also the first sight of a little blind boy who has just been healed. It's a powerful introduction, though our first impression might be that Jesus is a little older than we expected. Nevertheless, H. B. Warner exudes a worn compassion. At Mary Magdalene's first sight of him, she falls apart, ashamed: and seven demons come flying out in classic De Mille special effect fashion. There are other De Mille touches, and not just special effects, some working better than others. Hebrew words dissolve into English translations of the sins of the bystanders as Jesus writes on the ground. A group of children bring a broken doll to Jesus to be "healed." And in the Crucifixion sequence, all heaven breaks loose, with storms and earthquakes (in a sequence filmed in two-color Technicolor strip) that climaxes in a Resurrection and Ascension that threatens to sink back down under the weight of its own effect-laden presentation.

What is really striking about De Mille's approach in this film are some daring — some might say unscriptural, others masterful — rearrangements and compressions of the material. To a large degree, the story is arranged thematically rather than following precisely the conventional chronology. Christ clears the temple (creating a terrific stampede of lambs and cattle), provoking a Triumphal Procession — not His entry into Jerusalem, but the entry of cheering throngs of people into the temple, bearing palm branches, acclaiming him king. As they do, Satan appears from behind a column to tempt Him with temporal power. But Jesus tells the crowd his kingdom is not of this world, sending a disappointed Judas straight to the Pharisees to make his fateful deal. Any changes in the material seemed to have provoked less complaints than the controversy over the film's treatment of Jews. The film was banned in some cities when Jewish organizations charged that it cast Jews as Christ-killers; Demille insisted that he only depicted a few corrupt leaders among the religious authorities, but his depiction of the High Priest in stereotypical fashion seems to weaken his argument.

Cecil B. De Mille was famous for disparaging the notion of Hollywood "extra": that is, he threatened to dismiss any actor or supervisor who was caught not putting heart and soul into their job. Thus, his background crowds are far from anonymous, always seething with life, individuality, and rooted in the setting. And so this King of Kings (unlike the 1961 film of the same title) presents a surprisingly fresh and lively Gospel, one used by ministers and missionaries much like the later "Jesus film," as a tool for evangelism, onscreen in churches and darkest jungles for many years to come.