by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After a Bible discussion at Unity Fellowship Church in
which, among other things, Charles and I had participated in a brief
conversation about what’s gone wrong with most movies based on Bible stories, I
decided to get out our DVD of one of the most intriguing and perfectly
wrong-headed Bible movies ever made: Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 version of The
Ten Commandments. One of the most famous
atheists of all time, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote a book called Beyond
Good and Evil; any fair assessment of the
1956 DeMille Ten Commandments
might well be called “Beyond Good and Bad.” It’s virtually impossible to judge
this movie by normal cinematic criteria of excellence (or the lack thereof)
because it is so much itself, so much governed by its own artistic code, it
seems to exist in a movie netherworld, a perfect expression of a basically
corrupt artistic (and commercial) impulse. When Cecil B. DeMille emerged as a
director in the late 1910’s, he was considered one of the world’s greatest
filmmakers, and a lot of aspiring directors — including Erich von Stroheim,
Sergei Eisenstein and Fritz Lang — looked up to him. Watching his silent films
like Male and Female (1919) and The
Affairs of Anatol (1920), one can see why:
early DeMille combined a fine aesthetic eye with a strong sense of drama.
Indeed, if you want a shock run The Affairs of Anatol and Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide
Shut (1999), back to back — and note that
though the films are strikingly similar in plot and theme (both are based on
stories by turn-of-the-last-century Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler),
DeMille’s movie is far more sophisticated artistically, culturally and even
morally. Then, after the William Desmond Taylor and Fatty Arbuckle scandals of
1922 rocked the film industry and started the calls for censorship that would
result in the promulgation of the Production Code in 1930 and its full-out
enforcement four years later, DeMille realized that the movies he’d made his
reputation on — full-out tales of sexual decadence among the 1 percent, who in
his films (designed by his openly Gay art director, Mitchell Leisen) bathed in
tubs the size of Olympic swimming pools — were becoming more dubious both
politically and commercially.
So he discovered the Bible. In 1923 he made a
silent version of The Ten Commandments that ran 2 ½ hours, and for its first hour it told the story of Moses
and the Exodus while for the rest of its running time it presented a freshly
minted (by DeMille’s long-time screenwriter, Jeanie MacPherson) tale of
business, political and sexual corruption in modern-day San Francisco that was
supposed to illustrate the enduring importance of the Ten Commandments as rules
to live by. The film was a huge box-office hit, and four years later
(temporarily separated from his long-time home at Paramount, a studio DeMille
and his original business partner Jesse Lasky had helped found, and working
independently) DeMille followed it up with a biopic of Jesus, The
King of Kings, that was the first film he
made based entirely on a Bible story.
DeMille would turn to the Bible and to faith in general for material again and
again, including making The Crusades
(1935) — a surprisingly fair-minded presentation that treated Islam quite
fairly instead of turning the Crusades into the “Christians good, Muslims bad”
parable one would have expected from that time and that director (I’ve long
suspected that Dudley Nichols, who co-wrote The Crusades and is a surprising writer to see on a DeMille
movie, was responsible for its intellectual and religious sophistication) — and
the ghastly Samson and Delilah
(1949), starring Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr, of which Groucho Marx famously
said he wouldn’t watch it because “I never see movies in which the man’s tits
are bigger than the woman’s.” Old and conscious that his time on Earth was
limited, after he finally won a competitive Academy Award for his Ringling
Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus film The Greatest Show On Earth (1953), DeMille went to his bosses at Paramount
(he’d returned there in 1932 for the blockbuster hit The Sign of the
Cross and never worked anywhere else again)
and got them to green-light a full-out Biblical remake of The Ten
Commandments.
The finished film lasted
three hours and 40 minutes — making it seem, quite frankly, more an endurance
test than an entertainment — it was shot in three-strip Technicolor (one of the
last gasps of the process that was being replaced by Eastmancolor and monopack
Technicolor) and Paramount’s patented wide-screen process VistaVision (which
rejected the anamorphic “squeeze” principle of CinemaScope — a lens that
distorted the image so a wide frame would fit on ordinary 35 mm film, and a
compensating decoder lens on the projector that undistorted it again — and
instead shot on 35 mm film but turned the image sideways so it could be wider
without the distortion of CinemaScope) — and DeMille extensively ballyhooed the
fact that he was shooting the film on location in Egypt. He had gone to Egypt’s
new revolutionary government, headed by General Gamal Abdel Nasser, with some
trepidation — Egypt was already turning to the Soviet Union for funding the
Aswan High Dam after the U.S. had refused to do so — and had prepared an
elaborate presentation to convince Nasser to allow him to work in Egypt. Nasser
and the other generals in his government who met with DeMille startled him by
telling him up-front that as kids they had so enjoyed The Crusades, and in particular its fair-minded treatment of
Islam, that as far as they were concerned DeMille could go anywhere and shoot
anything he wanted in their country. At that, only 5 percent of the finished
film was shot in Egypt; the rest was done on Hollywood soundstages with some of
the most obvious painted backdrops and process screens in history — and though
audiences in 1956 raved about the special effects, they seem dated and tacky
today (especially the parting of the Red Sea, in which the waters recede to the
sides of the screen and form solid-looking walls flanking a virtually dry sea
bed), despite the participation of master effects technician John P. Fulton
(who 23 years earlier had figured out how to make Claude Rains invisible) as
well as Farciot Edouart, Paramount’s usual effects head. (I remember that when
I first saw the 1923 silent version I was struck by how much more convincingly
DeMille and his effects person then, Roy Pomeroy, had parted the Red Sea than
DeMille, Edouart, Fulton et al.
did it 33 years later.)
The Ten Commandments achieves a sort of perfect tackiness throughout all
three hours and 40 minutes. DeMille’s direction is surprisingly static, letting
his splendiferous sets and cast of thousands (literally — back then a “cast of
thousands” actually meant having to hire, pay and feed that many extras instead
of creating them digitally à la Titanic and Gladiator) tell his
story for him; more than any other director I can think of, DeMille’s command
of storytelling and the grammar of film actually declined as he got older. The script is written by committee
— Aeneas MacKenzie, Jesse Lasky, Jr. (son of DeMille’s first business partner
in films), Jack Gariss and Fredric M. Frank — and draws on a multitude of
sources, including The
Holy Scriptures as well as the works of other ancient historians like
Philo and Josephus (needed, DeMille explains in an extraordinary prologue he
delivers in front of a drawn curtain as well as supplying an omniscient
voice-over narration at particular junctures in the film itself, to fill in the
missing parts of Moses’ story from the Book of Exodus, which jumps from Moses
the baby in the bulrushes to Moses as a young man in the Egyptian court who’s
suddenly “outed” as a Hebrew) and at least three modern books DeMille had
obviously bought so he could give their authors money and credit and thereby
avoid plagiarism suits: Dorothy Clarke Wilson’s Prince of Egypt, J. H. Ingraham’s Pillar of Fire, and A. E. Southon’s On Eagle’s Wing. The dialogue achieves a near-perfect balance of
quasi-Biblical tonalities and Hollywood sillinesses, and the script as a whole
is content to dramatize the most superficial aspects of the story and avoid any
real attempt to probe What Made Moses Run. It also doesn’t help that the
cinematography by Loyal Griggs makes the entire movie look like those heavily
saturated, tackily designed color postcards of Biblical themes intensely
believing Christians used to post to their walls (and for all I know still do).
As it comes out in this film, Moses’ tale is essentially a coming-out story, in
which the baby Moses (Fraser Heston, Charlton Heston’s son, in what his dad
said in his published journals was his first and last acting credit) is set
adrift by his Jewish parents and found in a basket by the Egyptian princess
Bithiah (Nina Foch), who’s just lost her husband and accepts the presentation
of a baby as if he has impregnated her and fathered her son from the afterlife.
Moses grows up in the Egyptian court as the heir apparent and favorite of
Pharoah Seti (sometimes spelled “Sethi” in the documentation on the film),
played in his usual droll manner by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, thereby pissing off
Seti’s son Rameses (Yul Brynner, who was still acting on Broadway in The
King and I when The Ten
Commandments was filmed — he had to do all
his work on the Egyptian locations in one day so he could fly back and meet his
stage commitments — and would make The King and I as his next film). The gimmick is that Seti is going
to name either Rameses or Moses as his heir, which will mean not only becoming
Pharoah but also getting to marry Princess Nefretiri (Anne Baxter — virtually
all the actors seem to be locked in a competition to show who can be least convincing as a Biblical-era Egyptian or Jew, but
Baxter wins hands down; it also doesn’t help that she and Nina Foch look the
same age on screen even though they’re supposed to be of different
generations), who’s got the hots for Moses and has no idea he’s really a Hebrew
until Bithiah’s slave Memnet (Judith Anderson) “outs” him by showing the piece
of red-and-white Levite cloth he was wrapped in back in the basket 30 years
earlier. Bithiah kills Memnet for revealing the secret, but the damage has been
done, and Moses leaves the Egyptian court and is consigned to slavery along
with the rest of the Jews in Egypt — including his real mother Yochabel (Martha
Scott), whom he previously saved from being crushed to death on one of
Pharoah’s big construction projects without having any idea who she was; his
brother Aaron (John Carradine); his friend and eventual heir Joshua (John
Derek); and Joshua’s girlfriend Lilia (Debra Paget).
They’re being pushed to
complete the Pharoah’s grand city by master builder Daka (Vincent Price, who
actually turns in one of the best performances in the film even though he
responds to the script’s silliness by camping it up big-time the way he did in
a lot of his later horror films — it’s a real shame he gets killed an hour in)
and the Jewish overseer Dathan (Edward G. Robinson, who’d been blacklisted for
his Left-wing politics until DeMille, one of the most well-known Right-wingers
in Hollywood, got him taken off the blacklist so he could appear in The
Ten Commandments), who parlays his
knowledge of who and what Moses really is into a lavish mansion, the job as
Daka’s replacement and Lidia as his sex slave. Charlton Heston plays Moses as a
grim monomaniac; he’s not a good enough actor to suggest any moments of doubt
or torment — not that the script supplies him any such opportunities — instead
he goes through the whole movie with a fanatical devotion to his Cause and an
intolerance for dissent that rather plays against the film’s theme (expressed by
DeMille in his prologue, which makes it clear he saw The Ten
Commandments as a Cold War parable of
resistance to Communism) of liberty vs. tyranny. The film also comes to a dead
stop for various production numbers — it seems that just about any time DeMille
can find an excuse to have scantily clad girls dance (or something like it)
before the giant VistaVision cameras, he does — and of course he makes the most
of the opportunity the Golden Calf sequence presents for the film’s biggest and
tackiest orgy. (Of course DeMille was still working under the Production Code —
indeed, one of the attractions of The Ten Commandments as a subject matter for him, in 1956 as well as
1923, was the opportunity to present spectacular sinning and then punish it on
screen — though the Paramount Home Video DVD contains a “G” rating, obviously
from a theatrical reissue in the early days of the rating system that replaced
the yes-or-no Production Code; today, as Charles pointed out, the sex and
violence in this movie would probably get it a PG, or even a PG-13.)
Oddly, the
film turns considerably less interesting after the intermission (Paramount
split it onto two DVD’s and blessedly spotted the break where the original
theatrical intermission fell), when the at least potentially dramatically
compelling confrontations between Moses and Rameses and the death of Rameses’
son are over and DeMille actually has to show the Exodus. When composer Elmer
Bernstein — who won an Academy Award for this film just three years after
making his movie debut in Cat Women on the Moon (I thought that was the most embarrassing debut
credit for a composer who went on to do major films and win an Oscar, but John
Williams’ credit on the 1958 juvenile delinquency drama Daddy-O certainly rivals it!) — turned in his score for the
start of the Exodus, DeMille decided it was too somber and sad, so he ordered
Bernstein to come up with something more joyful — and Bernstein responded with
a wildly inappropriate action theme that sounds like the score he wrote for The
Magnificent Seven three years later. One
would have thought the parts of the movie most strongly and clearly based on
the Book of Exodus would have inspired DeMille and his writing committee more
than the rest of it — instead they come off more like a checklist (“Red Sea
parts? Check. Pharoah’s army drowns? Check. Golden Calf orgy? Check. Moses sees
the Burning Bush and God etches the Ten Commandments onto two stone tablets on
Mt. Sinai? Check”), and the film lumbers to a close, with Moses looking older in
every scene but in a totally unconvincing way (when DeMille as narrator
introduced his final appearance, I joked, “And the Lord anointed Charlton
Heston’s face with much crêpe paper to make his beard look long and white so he
would seem older”) and a final credit that reads, not “The End,” but, “So it
was written, so it shall be done.” And, as was virtually pre-ordained by its
overall conception and the era in which it was made, The Ten
Commandments did exceedingly well at the
box office and DeMille’s and Paramount’s coffers did overflow with its profits;
it was the second highest-grossing movie to that time (only Gone With
the Wind had made more) and the audiences,
if not the critics, pronounced it good.
