 Steiger played Pontius Pilate in Franco Zeffirelli's TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth (1977). Stacy Keach, who portrayed Barabbas, expressed his joy at the opportunity to work with Steiger, describing him as "generous and opinionated". In 1978, Steiger played a senator in Norman Jewison's F.I.S.T., opposite Sylvester Stallone, who played a Cleveland warehouse worker involved in the labor union leadership of the fictional organisation named Federation of Inter-State Truckers. Love and Bullets, later that year, in which Steiger appeared as a mafia boss, was poorly received; Roger Ebert dismissed it as a "hopelessly confused hodgepodge of chases, killings, enigmatic meetings and separations, and insufferably overacted scenes by Steiger alternating with alarmingly underacted scenes by [Charles] Bronson". The following year, Steiger was cast as a general opposite Richard Burton and Robert Mitchum in Andrew V. McLaglen's war film Breakthrough, set on the Western Front. In The Amityville Horror (1979), Steiger appeared as a disturbed priest, who is invited to perform an exorcism on a haunted house. Again Steiger was accused of overacting; Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote: "Mr. Steiger bellows and weeps and overdoes absolutely everything. He won't even pick up the phone before it's rung 12 or 15 times." Pauline Kael thought that Steiger's "spiritual agony was enough to shatter the camera lens".
