The Roman in the Living Room: Pilate on TV in the Early 1950s

After the success of DeMille’s King of Kings (1927), the most significant dramatisations of Pontius Pilate would appear on television. These “Sunday School” TV programs often had low budgets but high aims, such as those produced by Father James Friederich’s Cathedral Films, which also released a feature film called Day of Triumph. Pilate here is played by Lowell Gilmore in a peevish and almost kitschy manner. Other more nuanced programs were made by the Roman Catholic Family Theatre group under the direction of Father Patrick Peyton. Hill Number One, for instance, portrays the conversion the wife of Pontius Pilate (Leif Erickson) as a tale told by a chaplain to soldiers fighting in Korea. Equally high-minded and better-funded network programming would likewise turned to the story of Pilate in the early 1950s. Pontius Pilate was broadcast live on Studio One, CBS’s critically-acclaimed playhouse series. This drama, written by Michael Dyne and heavily script-doctored by Comparative Religion professor Moses Jung, portrays the break-up of Pilate’s marriage after he orders Jesus crucified. Although Procula and Pilate dream of “a house with white pillars,” this vision of their future life together in the suburbs is one Procula feels compelled to confront.