cecil b. de mille

26Moses stood at the entrance to the camp. He said, "Anyone who is on the Lord's side, come to me." All of the Levites joined him.

27Then he spoke to them. He said, "The Lord, the God of Israel, says, 'Each man must put on his sword. Then he must go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other. Each man must kill his brother, friend and neighbor.' " 28The Levites did as Moses commanded. About 3,000 of the people died that day. 29Then Moses said to the Levites, "You have been set apart for the Lord today. You stood against your own sons and brothers. And he has blessed you this day."

god of the bible's love+ mercy+ familiy values @ chrismas/easter movie time!

starting in the mid-1920s, he starts becoming an anachronism insofar as the style and themes of his films develop--if they can be said to develop--along lines pretty different from those in hollywood in general. that is they start to become ossified into "cecil b. de mille films." you'll notice in even "10 commandments" that his camera style and positioning of actors looks like something out of the early sound era. all that said, he was a master of his chosen style, and his films really MOVE excitingly. "the crusades" was a really EXCITING movie, even if it is patently ridiculous as history and much else.

Found a $10 DVD with The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur. Love the former, and it never, ever plays on TV, so I had to buy it.

2010 restored version--I'd never seen the bit at the beginning where Cecil walks out from behind a curtain to introduce things. First great moment of high camp is when the Ethiopian princess slobbers over Heston and Anne Baxter shoots daggers at her. Something that always makes me laugh: the way Heston keeps popping up out of nowhere during the plague-casting segment. Like when he turns the Nile red, he just wanders in from the right side of the frame to interrupt some ceremony being conducted by Ramses. How'd he get past security? Also: Baxter egging on Brynner as everything falls apart, and Heston pulling a George Costanza at the end and leaving on a high note--"That's it for me!"

As you can tell by my previous post, I love this film (not totally as camp--I do get caught up in the spectacle, and kind of turn back into a 7-year-old kid). A local rep is screening it on Sunday, a restored roadshow version; I assume it's the same as the DVD I watched two years ago. Excited!

i'm sorry, he was sort of awesome. i just watched 'the crusades.'

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Monday, February 28, 2005 8:51 PM (11 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
congrats

― RJ.G (Amateur(ist)), Monday, February 28, 2005 8:58 PM (11 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

was there some sort of imposter amateurist 11 years ago? weird.

Is there any character in any other film ever who's so thoroughly humiliated scene after scene as Yul Brynner here? Pretty much everyone openly mocks him from start to finish. He gets it from his rival, his father, his wife. He lets it slide every time, then goes back for more.

Notes I made on a certain ILXer's FB page:

* Camp aside, this has impressive sequences. Even as a kid I was moved by the scene in which Moses slowly walks away after Ramses sets the slaves free while the camera slowly pans right to catch Nefertiti bearing the body of her dead boy.

* Part of its power is that it has passages I can't laugh at preceding or succeeding eye-rolling moments.

* The Ramses-Nefertiti relationship gets more interesting. DeMille suggests, without hammering the audience, that they're more alike and deserving of each other than Moses and Nefertiri.

* The Nefertiri-Zipporah scene! I expect a camp catfight but it's played quietly and sadly.

I had to look up Zipporah--Frederick Wiseman's production company...

One thing I don't get is Ben-Hur on the TSPDT Top 1,000 list (500-something) but no Ten Commandments. I'll give you the chariot race, but De Mille's film is much better a bunch of different ways.

i have seen and semi-enjoyed CB's 1923 Ten Commandments...

King of Kings is better.

John Derek in a beard >>> Jeffrey Hunter in one tho

This is so not my genre, but I'll side with conventional wisdom that Ben-Hur is a lot more watchable, and far less wooden, than The Ten Commandments, which only had the parting of the seas and Anne Baxter camping it up to hold my interest.

So much more...Edward G. Robinson kills me: "Chief Hebrew overseer, mighty one."

crypto, your responses lately are forcing me to order my chariots from Tanis to destroy you.

I like Vincent Price's horndog architect

Your eyes had best find the deliver, Dathan, or you will have no eyes

*deliverer

First great bit of sex in the film (need Ann Baxter's reaction shot):

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_goOTcYF7VN4/SeKfxAHbkCI/AAAAAAAAAtA/U7YIrs2rSlg/s400/Commandments7.JPG

I've seen this film 25 times probably going back to annual family viewings as a kid, and I never realized till now that that's Woody Strode.

"And such a beautiful enemy!"

Pharaoh treats black Egyptians better (in a 1956 film) than the Hebrews.

I might have wondered upthread how consciously De Mille was of linking the film to events in the States (MLK was just getting started in '56). Maybe somewhat, maybe not at all.

Heston a committed civil rights activist at this point too

crypto, your responses lately are forcing me to order my chariots from Tanis to destroy you.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, March 27, 2016 10:37 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And unless there are ones you haven't been pointing out to me, they all seem to somehow involve Anne Baxter!

Also, this discussion reminds me that I found a used Criterion copy of the silent King of Kings a few years back that was so ridiculously cheap that I couldn't pass it up. Still need to watch that thing.

Jeffrey Hunter in one tho

deMille did not do THAT King of Kings, that was Nick Ray

CB's was with HB Warner, who was in his 50s when he played Jesus i think

i bought a 2xVHS of "Ten Commandments" last week and am re-watching today. it is pretty awesome. amazing moment when he first drops in on the Egyptian court after returning from exile and a guard stops him and asks "What kingdom has sent you?" and he says "The kingdom of the most high".

and he brushes the staff away

its so gangster

also Neferteri when she asks "Who else can soften Pharaoh's heart... or harden it?"

why you lying adder

the whole passover scene is amazing. that green fog wrapped around the moon with some red structure in the foreground. so eerie. lol at the kid who asks why they have to eat shitty bread. Moses explains it to him but he does this pregnant pause and we hear someone scream as they die right outside the door. it's the closest the movie gets to the Life of Brian.

this movie really stands up. it is long af but it is constantly moving. the script is super tight. i love the bits of humor they put in to deflate the more pompous and heavy moments. like after the Moses vs. Egyptian preists magic staff showdown, the Pharaoh's son just casually walks up to Moses and kicks him in the shin and then walks back while everybody laughs. the villains are very fun to watch plot and scheme and manipulate each other. there is also some real pathos. they don't make characters like these anymore. the costumes are amazing, these shiny metallic accurate-looking Egyptian royal garments. there is a scene where Yul Brynner is gearing up looking like Iron Man. the effects throughout are really good, with the exception of some rough blue screen keying. apparently they ran out of money and you can tell it is all up there on screen in the other scenes, shots of thousands of people and animals in real sets, or really well-done effects composites. the rain of hail that turns to fire was very a seamless and cool effect but the parting of the Red Sea is still impressive even if the seams are showing a bit. the film honestly loses it after the titular Commandments show up but that whole ending is a while ride with the PG orgy and the very cool explosive ending of the elemental magic of the commandment carving sequence. the ending of the film is basically a light going in the sky and for real feels like it was stolen for the ending of Ghostbusters and consequently the ending of every single comic book movie that comes out nowadays.

i plan on watching Cleopatra next.

Excellent piece by Bill Chambers on the latest reissue of The Ten Commandments, but really about De Mille: https://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2021/05/the-ten-commandments-1956.html

They say directors have a God complex. (As Eli Cross put it in The Stunt Man: "If God could do the tricks that we can do, he'd be a happy man!") That makes me think of Alfred Hitchcock, who exerted a precise formal control over films that frequently featured micromanagers of a sort trying to dominate their environment, and it makes me think of Cecil B. De Mille, who wasn't afraid to make God a protagonist, as though he could relate. My gut feeling is that Moses was made over from the stuttering drifter of the Bible into Arthur Fonzarelli in part because he's a proxy for De Mille, who similarly saw himself as a messenger of God ("My ministry was making religious movies and getting more people to read the Bible than anyone else ever has," he famously said) capable of feats of magic. Indeed, on some level you cash in your chips to turn Samson and Delilah and The Ten Commandments into special-effects spectaculars because you want a taste of what it's like to wield fire and brimstone against a city, though his enigmatic dissonances are arguably what's most God-like about De Mille, whose "Great Directors" page at SENSES OF CINEMA catalogues a host of biographical incongruities. He was an anti-unionist, for instance, who joined a union and picketed with them; an independent filmmaker loyal to Paramount; a tyrant who spread the wealth; a loyal husband who kept mistresses with his wife's approval; an Episcopalian with a Jewish mother; and a "profoundly religious but a non-church-going Christian." Those kinds of disparities in an individual are maddening, and the epitome of divine governance. The struggle to reconcile them is perhaps the essence of faith.

Watching The Ten Commandments and its satisfying, weird, and unusual mix of camp and genuine feeling, I'm struck by how powerful the scene between "fake" mom Bithia and real mom Yochabel: the civil rights era resonances are inescapable, and, I gotta say, Heston's up to it. A beautifully framed sequence too.

I experience cognitive dissonance watching The Ten Commandments because Moses is kind of a dick from just past the two-hour mark when he talks to the burning bush till the finale. I know his people have to be let go and everything, but I can't help root for the Pharaoh in the latter part of the film, especially when Nefretiri starts relentlessly kicking him when he's down.

The women in this really elevate the film, and they're well-cast. Anne Baxter is so fully enjoying herself. Debra Paget looks great and Yvonne De Carlo is stunning. In terms of dramatic credibility I prefer many other ancient world epics to this one, but De Mille does excel with visuals and pacing. The film also makes me think about the politics of 1950s America, the conspicuous religiosity of the time, the fact that so many name actors seemed to consider it the highest honor to appear in a production as mad as this.

I experience cognitive dissonance watching The Ten Commandments because Moses is kind of a dick from just past the two-hour mark when he talks to the burning bush till the finale.

I found it impressive that the scriptwriters included a scene between Zipporah and Nefertiti where they acknowledge exactly this ("You lost him when he went to seek his god; I lost him when he found his god").

Yeah and he actually becomes more than a little frightening because he starts to resemble certain religiously inspired people from our own lifetime.

"Zipporah" reminds me - this film confirms that most people mispronounce "Sephora" as in the store.

"And this you call treason? Who would take a throne by force that he has earned by DEEDS?"