Saw the cut-down version of this recently on cable, letterboxed (the only way to go!). For all the bad press it evidently got in its day, I found the color cinematography dazzling, the compositions wonderful (as we'd expect from the director of Shane and Giant), and the performances ... not too bad at all, for the most part. Many if not most of celebs who did cameos are no longer household names (or faces), so they're less jarring than they must have been in the 60s (the groaning exception, of course, being John Wayne as the Centurion). Von Sydow is fine if a bit stiff, Heston as the Baptist is a bit too stiff, Jose Ferrer is wonderful (did his son Miguel study dad's performance as Herod Antipas for his role in Traffic?), and so are most of the other key parts.
If Scorcese's Last Temptation of Christ comes off as less an art film and more as another corny Hollywood biblical epic, Stevens' film comes off less as the latter and more as the former, given that one's expectations are for corn, not art. (Is that clear?) I've said previously that Scorcese's film was basically a ripoff of Pasolini's wonderful Gospel According St Matthew, and I still think that's the case so far as the basic treatment goes, but I now think that visually, as a wide-screen color film, it rips off Stevens.
Greatest Story is the first Christ movie (and probably the first biblical epic) where the director obviously understood that the physical setting could be a very important part of the story - the sparse, barren landscape that people could disappear into and come back having seen visions, etc. Scorcese seems to have picked up on this too, but his visual sense isn't a jot on Stevens', for sure.
I do agree that the story drags, and the whole thing is probably overlong. I was also disappointed that Stevens does so little with the final temptation and betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane. I've always felt this is the dramatic climax of the whole story - the final point of no return for Jesus - and oddly, the recent TV miniseries version, with Jeroen Krabbe as a fun modern-dress Satan, is the only one that's really grasped this, I think. Maybe some of this is among the stuff that didn't survive from the 260-minute version?
Overall, I'd heartily urge George Stevens Jr., who's done such a good job of preserving his father's legacy, to consider restoring this one and letting us see it on the big screen again. It's a feast.
