5: The Gospel Road, The Hollywood Jesus, and The Troubadour of the Anawim

For this fifth episode, we have followed the star of the East all the way back to 1973, where, fittingly, we find five very different Jesus films and at least five very different Jesuses vying for our attention. For the most part, however, our focus will be trained on just one of those five pictures: Robert Elfstrom’s The Gospel Road: A Story of Jesus Told & Sung By Johnny Cash. Approached from a variety of angles, the film is framed against the backdrop of the faltering revival of the Hollywood Jesus Film inaugurated by the release of Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings in 1961; situated within the context of Johnny Cash’s burgeoning mythos and especially in light of the spiritual re-awakening that presaged his recovery from years of steady substance abuse in the late 1960s; and read with and against the other Jesus Films released that year, Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell principal among them. The episode also explores the film’s innovative use of sound and song, its complex marriage of competing Christologies, its many formal eccentricities, and its navigation of the various inconsistencies on evidence across the four gospels. In addition, a bit of genre theory, some chat about the book of Isaiah, some stuff on those monumental prison albums… so on and so forth.