THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
With Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Anne Baxter, Edward G. Robinson, Yvonne De Carlo, Debra Paget, John Derek, Cedric Hardwicke, and Vincent Price.
It’s a tribute to the power (if not exactly the wisdom) of De Mille’s beliefs that not even the hardiest efforts of the gremlins at Paramount Pictures to muck up his achievement have fully succeeded. They’ve taken this feature made in VistaVision and capriciously stretched it out into an anamorphic ‘Scope format, which means that the top and bottom of every frame is trimmed in order to accommodate the horizontal Band-Aid-shaped format–a familiar shape in 50s movies, but not the one that this picture was shot or originally shown in. There may be some form of divine retribution at work here; De Mille was a notorious foot fetishist, and thanks to Paramount’s skullduggery, many of De Mille’s foreground players are now deprived of their feet. But as far as I can tell, all his other obsessions manage to ring loud and clear, and the glorious, wide-ranging Technicolor palette of Loyal Griggs’s cinematography–a feast for the eyes that makes every current Hollywood movie look like oatmeal by comparison–is otherwise preserved intact.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
De Mille’s personal investment in the production was such that he persisted in directing the film against his doctor’s orders after suffering a heart attack, and all of his profits from the film were donated to charities. And in the film itself, after appearing before the story proper to introduce the picture and explain its contemporary relevance (as well as warn the audience about its running time), he continues offscreen as narrator, so that we’re constantly aware of him as a moral presence.
Nefretiri’s only rival in the film’s sexual hierarchy is Joshua’s girlfriend Lilia (Debra Paget), a somewhat more sympathetic character–she is, after all, a Hebrew, not an Egyptian–who also has no biblical counterpart. Lilia winds up as the concubine of the only completely unsympathetic male character–a creepy informer and small-time Hebrew demagogue called Nathan (Robinson)–in order to save Joshua’s life (“What would you do to gain his clemency?” “Anything, my lord, anything!”) It’s never clear whether she reunites with Joshua after the Hebrews leave Egypt, but the implication is that she won’t because now she’s damaged goods.
(1) Surprisingly enough, the grandfather of the disaster film spares us most of the plagues of Moses, including the locusts, frogs, lice, and flies, the outbreak of boils, the destruction of cattle and grains, and the fall of darkness; all we get, in fact, are the hailstones and the killing of the firstborn–which further suggests that spectacle for its own sake is not really part of De Mille’s agenda.
