I got home last night after giving my final pre-concert lecture at the SF Symphony for the season, poured myself a glass of wine (Heitz Cellars cabernet), got the dinner into the oven, and decided that my best course of action would be to vegetate for a while. After all, I spent the better part of the day researching and writing a program note on Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No. 9 (and made great progress), and then worked the early evening at the SFS.
As it turns out, ABC was showing DeMille’s The Ten Commandments in crisp high-def, definitely worth revisiting, so I slowly worked my way through the bottle of cabernet as the elephantine movie lumbered along. There’s something deeply funny about anybody considering this to be a “religious” flick that is appropriate for the passover/easter season. If so much as a single frame of The Ten Commandments is spiritual, then so are plastic easter eggs, christmas cards, and day-glo Jesus statues.
The film has had a thorough cleanup and restoration job and looks like a gazillion dollars—bright and clear, not a mark on it. The Ten Commandments was designed as eye candy, after all, and so seeing it looking like new is a delight. Visual subtlety was not a DeMille trademark, especially not here in his last movie. Lots of primary colors, bright lollipop reds, intense greens, velvety blues. Even the desert sand looks good enough to eat.
When you get right down to it, The Ten Commandments is a Victorian pageant manquée. People strike dramatic poses on elaborate sets, say a few lines, and pause for the music to swell. Most of it could be performed on a large stage before painted canvas cycloramas, with a treadmill for the chariots. From time to time the company assembles for a crowd scene, each serving as a punctuation mark between a series of short, one-on-one dialog scenes. The acting is mostly silent-film style, anachronistic in the 1950s and even more so nowadays.
The scene between Anne Baxter and Charlton Heston, after Chuck’s silver-streak hairdo in Sinai and conversion from royal studmuffin to thundering prophet, makes a case in point. Baxter, as sultry Nefretiri who is downright desperate to jump Heston’s bones, stops him from leaving her Nile barge by taking a broad pose, facing the camera directly. She delivers her lines as though playing to the second balcony at the London Palladium: Who else can soften Pharoah’s heart? Or harden it?
Now imagine the scene as a silent. She strikes her oh-so-stagey pose, and her lips start moving. An intertitle card comes up with the dialog lines. Then we’re back to the barge with her looking up at Heston with a bed-me-now-or-else look. Chuck turns her to face him; he puts his hand on her chin and looks intently into her eyes. Another intertitle card: “Yes! This may be the dust from which God works his will.” Back to the barge; Chuck leaves and Anne stares into the camera lens.
A film about Jews, yet it’s full of ham.
The “big” scenes in The Ten Commandments all work without dialog: the building of the desert city, the exodus from Egypt, the gathering of the Egyptian army, the parting of the Red Sea, the bacchanale at Mt. Sinai. All they need is music and they’re good to go.
It all makes sense when you realize that many of DeMille’s best movies were silents. He made the transition to sound gracefully enough, but at the same time, those instincts honed from 1914 to 1930 never really left him. And from the beginning his big pageant pictures had a Victorian look ‘n’ feel about them. Consider King of Kings, the 1920s blockbuster with H.B. Warner as Jesus: it’s really a series of tableaux, one after another. And his historical sound films—think Cleopatra, The Crusades, and The Sign of the Cross—are all pageant-like.
That probably explains why The Ten Commandments is still watchable; it was a museum artifact from the beginning and so the passage of time only adds to its stilted charm. It’s like watching a 19th century opera rather than a modern movie, deliberately and successfully archaic in style and tone despite making splendid use of widescreen lenses, Technicolor, stereo sound, and special effects. Like a set of glossy illustrations to a kid’s Bible, it doesn’t even pretend to connect with real life, real people, or real places.
I get a kick out of the occasional subversive performance, particularly Edward G. Robinson as the Jewish overseer Dathan. Probably the screenwriters had a broad schtick-y character in mind, but Robinson played it cool, droll, and calculating, and obviously had a ball imparting a screwy twist to his often ridiculously melodramatic lines.
And of course The Ten Commandments remains one of the all-time great collections of unintentional camp. Pride of place must go to the scene between Vincent Price and the captured John Derek. Price played the role like a decadent old queen, and despite his character’s presumed heterosexuality, he’s almost drooling as he spread-eagles Derek between two columns and prepares to—ahem—have his way with the unfortunate chap. It slipped past the censors, somehow.
Moses….your HAIR!
It’s a ridiculous, silly, stupid movie; high-gloss dreck, Hollywood excess in the worst imaginable taste. But oh, how sweet it is…