This fall, the big screen spotlights religion

This is also the topic of his upcoming book, "Achtung! Vorurteile" (Beware Prejudices), written in German.

Ustinov was born in London. His mother was French, his father German, and his ancestors Russian. That diverse background, combined with his command of six languages, has given him an unusually broad cultural and life experience.

Ustinov has done his homework on Rome, having produced "Inside the Vatican," a six-part series for Canadian TV that examined the politics of the Vatican.

"At the press conference a long time ago now," says Ustinov, "I was asked why they allowed me to do it since I've been divorced, and I'm not a Catholic.... And I said, well maybe that was the reason....

"I'm not at all ecclesiastical," Ustinov says. "In fact, I've written, in my new book and also in a musical work for Orchestra and Speaker, that really ancient Greece had the only democratic religion, in which you could pray to whichever god you wanted. It was like a cabinet. And curiously enough, democracy in civic affairs, in lay affairs, has become now extremely dominant as an idea.

"At the same time," Ustinov continues, "the idea of monotheism has become a virtual autocracy of various religions, with the disastrous results we can see in the Middle East and everywhere else."

In the course of his prodigious career, Ustinov has famously starred as Hercule Poirot in "Death on the Nile" and Herod in Franco Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth."

But he doesn't think biblical or religion-based movies necessarily offer the viewer a spiritual experience.

"That's the fault of the Hayes Code and various forms of enforcement of taste," says Ustinov, "during which religious films became a photo finish between God and Satan, in which, for the sake of the Hayes Code, God had to win in the last two seconds."

Battles with or within the church, on or off the screen, have changed quite a bit in modern times.

"What Luther had to fight about," says Dr. Marty, an ordained Lutheran minister, was the question: "Is God a judge who whomps us unless we buy our way into salvation, or is God a gracious giver? And on that there's so much agreement [among theologians] that there couldn't be a battle today. That's the big difference."

But Marty says that we still live off Luther's then-new concept of individual freedom of conscience.

"Now complicating that, of course," says Marty, "is that as a medieval man some of the things he stood for and did are very shocking and abrasive to our present world."

For example, afraid that a peasant revolt of the 1520s would lead to anarchy in Germany, Luther told the princes to kill the peasants. Thousands died. The movie covers this tragedy, but also his stand against religious oppression.

"He stands up to pope and emperor," says Marty. "He's a major contributor to the enlargement of human freedoms by breaking up that single dominant system and by placing so much value on individual conscience over and against the church."

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