On vacation in London, I was invited to preview the film at a private screening for my eyes only. This was not a perk. It was a security measure. I was begged not to tell anyone the title of the movie, or even mention that a print was in England. Stopping in New York on the way home, I was directed to a pay phone on Madison Avenue, called the number I was given and followed instructions to the town house where Scorsese was living. I was greeted at the door by a security guard.

Perhaps it was inevitable that my review defended the film against charges of heresy. Both Scorsese and I had attended Catholic schools and fell easily into the language of religion. We spoke often about Catholicism, which in pre-Vatican II days was a seductive labyrinth of logic, ritual, vision and guilt. Pauline Kael said the most creative American directors of the 1970s (she listed Scorsese, Altman and Coppola) benefitted from being raised within traditional Catholic imagery. Scorsese’s frequent writing partner Paul Schrader grew up in a no less intense Calvinist environment. To Scorsese’s image in “Mean Streets” of Charlie holding his hand over a candle flame and imagining the fires of hell, we can add Schrader’s mother stabbing him with a pin and telling him hell was a million times worse and it never ended.

But all of that theological debate was 20 years ago. Watching the film again, I realized it was Scorsese’s first shot largely outdoors since “Boxcar Bertha” (1972). He is a filmmaker of the city, of bars, clubs, bedrooms, kitchens, nightclubs, boxing rings, pool halls and taxis. On location in Morocco, he found vast, hostile expanses of hard soil, distant mountains and struggling vegetation. The sun is merciless. This is an Old Testament land, not hospitable to the message of love and forgiveness.

The character of Christ himself is radically different from most previous film portraits. He is a weary, self-doubting individual, not always willing to carry the souls of man on his shoulders. There are times when he seems not to know or believe he is the son of God, and when he does, he uses that knowledge as a reason to rebuke his mother and the memory of Joseph. He berates and hectors his followers, and confides mostly in Judas, who is radically recast in this story as a good man who is only following instructions. The film follows the bold revisionism of Nikos Kazantzakis, whose novel was placed on the church’s index of forbidden books.