Much is revealed in the DVD version of DeMille's "Commandments"
It was the climax of a long and storied career.
Half a hundred years ago, 75 year old Cecil B. DeMille set out on a five year journey to create what he called the greatest motion picture of all time. DeMille, a dyed-in-the-wool idealist, was convinced that this picture, 1956’s <i>The Ten Commandments</i>, would last the ages.
Let’s give him half marks, for he was both right on the money – quite a bit of money in fact; <i>Commandments</i>was the most expensive film produced to that time – and completely off the mark.
Hard to believe that a man who witnessed so many technical and dramatic changes in the motion picture industry, from his first film in 1917 to <i>Commandments</i>, failed to foresee that the special effects and acting in this film would inevitably date.
More excusable, I suppose, was his blindness to the great ideological shift in society, from traditional Christianity to alternative forms of spiritualism.
And yet, the old codger wasn’t crazy. For we here we are, still discussing the film in this day and age - specifically, its new life as a recent issue on state-of-the-art DVD.
The two-disc DVD of <i>Commandments</i> reveals the great showman in toto, the good, the bad and the idiosyncratic. Many conventions that were part and parcel of this film’s initial release, customarily excised from the TV versions you and your family have watched for years at Easter or Christmas, have been restored. These include an overture, an intermission, and an intro by DeMille himself, who stands “in one”, to use an old vaudeville term, before a grandiose curtain to announce the film’s theme, that of fascism vs freedom; should Moses conspire with Nefritiri and thrive under the Pharaoh Ramses the 2nd, or should he suffer poverty, humiliation and physical torture in the name of a political alternative? DeMille makes it plain in this intro that for him, this is not so much a religious film as a political allegory. Memories of Hitler, after all, were less than a decade old; Korea was even fresher on the mind. And the first stirrings of the American civil rights movement, via Little Rock, were poised to make headlines.
Everything else, however, is here as well, glaringly exposed by restorative technology: DeMille’s over reliance on blue and red filters, the clapboard, backlot-based sets (despite months of shooting in Egypt and Sinai), and the gowns and tunics of sherbet green, gaudy ochre, and other colors worthy of Italian dime-store pottery. Then there are the special effects, most notably the burning bush and parting of the Red Sea; the bush talks in the voice of The Lord (also played by the film’s Moses, Charlton Heston), and as the bush’s red and yellow animated aura pulses to the wisdom of an unseen God, we are reminded of <i>The Wizard Of Oz</i> - though I suppose it’s fitting that DeMille the showman-trickster would cast the Almighty in this particular image.
The acting is hit and miss; it’s largely a matter of whose natural cadences are best suited to the kind of Americanized Shakespeare the era’s writers, in an act of reverence, attributed to Biblical subject matter. Anne Baxter’s patented breathiness doesn’t suit it at all as the horny Nefritiri, but Heston’s grit-teethed concision, Yul Brynner’s Russian formality, and Vincent Price’s arch feyness fit it like a mile-high headdress.
That DVD inevitability, the special features, include a choppy but interesting history of the film, an old newsreel of its New York premiere, and of course, trailers.
The film, along with William Wyler’s <i>Ben Hur</i>, was the apex of religious subject matter as big box office; subsequent efforts suffered increasingly tepid receptions, until John Huston’s agnostic <i>The Bible</i> all but slayed it. Today, it’s back, largely as a statement against the threat of corrupted Middle Eastern thought, with films like <i>The Passion of the Christ</i> and in more subtle forms such as the Christ metaphors <i>The Chronicles of Narnia</i> and the latest <i>Superman</i> installment.
Enough intellectualization. Moldy or not, <i>The Ten Commandments</i> is a fun watch. It’s a good story, even if Semitic history is not your thing, and such scale, romance and earnestness invested in it you can’t help but bow, in spite of your most modern instincts, before its self-importance, as if at the sandaled foot a booming-voiced bush ornately aflame.
